“GREAT RIVER” OF GENESIS

Evening Star, Issue 23503, 17 February 1940, Page 3

“GREAT RIVER” OF GENESIS

BIG ENGINEERING SCHEME During the next few years British engineers in Iraq will be performing a valuable and complex task in the Biblical lands by the Euphratesfourth of the rivers of Eden. They are to construct the so-called Habbaniyah escape for the protection of farmers and peasants between the Euphrates and Tigris, who have suffered severely in the past when floods have burst the Euphrates’s banks. This “ great river ” of Genesis, with its brazen-sounding name, is the longest in Western Asia. It rises in the Armenian highlands, and flows down along a wandering path of 1.750 miles to the Persian Gulf. Babylon of the towers stood upon its banks. Ten miles to the west of its present course, in a waste of desert, are the, mounds of Ur. of the Chaldees. At Larsa reigned King Arioch, who fought in the Battle of Kings, and was afterwards defeated by Abraham. WHEN FLOODS POUR DOWN. The new works are near Ramadi. At certain times of the year—notably about March when the_ snow melts in spring on the Turkish hills —floods pour down the Euphrates, the hanks burst near Lake Habbaniyah, and water sweeps across the plain, washing away mud huts, destroying crops, and cutting the road from Damascus to Badgkd. The Habbaniyah escape has been devised to prevent this periodical disaster. Two British firms are responsible—Messrs Coode, Wilson, Mitchell, and Vaughan-Lee are the consulting engineers who drew up the plans, and Messrs Balfour, Beatty and Co. the contractors carrying out the work The consulting engineers, explaining the scheme to a representative of ‘The Observer,’ said that an inlet channel is to be made between the Euphrates and the extensive Lake Habbaniyah. When floods come down in force, the opening of a regulator will allow water to pass from the river into the lake, and so relieve the pressure in the Euphrates. If the lake gets too full, and can hold no more river water, the regulator of a new outlet channel at the far end of Habbaniyah will be opened and the level of the lake lowered. Surplus water then flows away down the_ outlet channel, as through the waste-pipe of a bath, and runs across low-lying, swampy land to a depression in the desert where it evaporates. Meantime, the lake can take more flood water from the Euphrates. PLAN TO TAKE FOUR YEARS. Later, it may be possible to make another channel back to the river from the lake and impound the flood water for irrigation purposes during the summer months. The present scheme,_ however, is likey to take four years; it will be necessary in the course of it to shift as much as 7,600,000 cubic metres of soil. The great stone-built regulator of the inlet channel will have 12 openings and gates, and its counterpart on the outlet channel four fewer. Excavating machines do a great deal but approximately 2,000_ men % will be employed!. ’ Habbaniyah, incidentally, is an important air centre, both military and civil, and the work is being undertaken in the vicinity of the R.A.F. station there. The entire scheme is to cost about £885,000. Thus, on December 4, when the contract was signed formally by M. Jalal Balan, Minister. of Communications and Works, and representatives of the contractors, the Government of Iraq showed effectively its confidence in Britain, in British engineering, and in the outcome of the German war.