By John — Desalination News
Israel’s algae-driven desalination crisis is now leaving a visible mark on the Sea of Galilee, the country’s largest freshwater reservoir. Within ten days of the crisis beginning in late August, the lake has lost roughly 870 million gallons (3.3 million cubic metres) of water as authorities sharply increased pumping to cover the shortfall from shuttered coastal plants, according to Israeli water officials.
Freshwater Reserves Absorbing the Strain
With Ashkelon and Ashdod still offline and several other plants running at reduced capacity, the Water Authority has kept household and agricultural supply stable mainly by drawing more heavily on the Sea of Galilee, alongside groundwater wells and reservoirs. That strategy has kept a full-blown shortage at bay, but it is doing so by drawing down a freshwater resource that Israel spent decades trying to reduce its reliance on, precisely by building out the coastal desalination network now sidelined by the algae bloom.
A New Complication: Water Quality at the Lake
Adding to the pressure, Israel’s Health Ministry has issued a water-quality warning for the Sea of Galilee itself, and an area near Hukok Beach in the north was empty of swimmers following the alert. A separate factor now under scrutiny is a bloom of blue-green algae in the lake, distinct from the marine microalgae that knocked out the coastal desalination plants, raising the awkward possibility that the freshwater source now being tapped harder to substitute for desalination is facing its own contamination concerns.
The Bigger Picture
The lake drawdown adds a fresh data point to the case, made by water-policy experts since the start of the crisis, that Israel’s near-total reliance on a small number of coastal desalination plants left the system with too little backup capacity. The Sea of Galilee was, for decades, Israel’s primary water source before desalination scaled up; officials had hoped to keep drawdown from the lake to a minimum to let it continue recovering from years of drought. With the algae bloom still disrupting plants along the coast and no confirmed fix in hand, the Water Authority faces a narrowing set of options for keeping supply stable without drawing the lake down further.