Great Man-Made River

> this is usually not possible since the water is still salty from the sea

Excuse my naive question, but where did the population get drinking water from prior to the GMMR?

1. How come so much water collects in the desert, rather than closer to the coastline?

2. Is there some decent English text, in a book or online, which describes how Libyan society worked up until 2012? With focus on social and political structures and their interaction?

Is there any worry about what would happen if the water supply runs out? The article noted that the GMMR might run out in 60-100 years and supplies millions of people with water.

What do you think of Gaddafi? I read on wiki he said that GMMR was the eighth wonder of the world.

I find it very cool that you were there for something like this.

How was it funded? Seems very expensive.

Were regular people excited about it? Was there a meaningful change in day to day life after it was completed?

Here is a painting of the view from the "Isteiner Klotz" in southwestern Germany prior to the "Rheinbegradigung":

https://www.gkgbs.ch/obsolet/schulleben/oekowoche/1998-2003/...

Here is a picture of the (approximately) same view today (well, 20 years ago), you can use the church for orientation. The Rhine is at the far right corner. The village once had a small fishing harbor.

https://www.gkgbs.ch/obsolet/schulleben/oekowoche/1998-2003/...

> which is totally insane from the perspective of the available technology at the time.

What they did was pretty clever: they didn't dig an entire new river bed (that would've been impossible), but only some small, narrow shortcut "pilot beds", protected by a dam. You can see such a shortcut here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/K%...

After the shortcut was finished, they opened up the dam. The Rhine then slowly dug a new bed itself.

Does this project link up to the Rhein-Amstel canal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam%E2%80%93Rhine_Canal

I don't mean to be a wet-blanket with my comment, just to point out the potential negative impacts of human engineering, when such engineering is not well-thought-out.

We (in gulf south US) have had similar engineering projects with the Mississippi River (et al) over the course of the last couple of centuries. Largely the goal has been to keep the rivers from flooding their banks, which they are keen to do in various places, mostly yearly. The impetus for this is of course to aid in the development of major cities and keep farmlands productive.

What is happening as a result, however, is now known to be truly disastrous for my home state of Louisiana, where the adage is "Louisiana is losing a football field an hour"[0] due (in large part) to the levees preventing the sediment from the rivers from depositing along the coast and helping to keep the coastal marshes in place. There are other (secondary) ill effects as well, that are perhaps more subtle. I was on a native plant society field trip last week to study one of our more southerly "bottomlands" (mixed swamp/marsh/upland habitat). What we found is that many of the freshwater-wetland-specific trees are becoming severely unhealthy and/or dying due to the influx of brackish water (mixed salt/fresh) from the gulf/lakes in the area. This is largely due to the loss of sediment that normally would be deposited from the Mississippi river - that sediment helps to reform the uplands surrounding the bottomlands, and without it, other water sources are able to carve a path in. Some of this, of course, is natural, and part of how Louisiana's wetlands normally change over time, but they do seem to be changing more rapidly.

Fortunately, there is a large amount of interest among Louisianians to fix these problems. There are some more large engineering projects designed to undo some of this damage, specifically with projects to reroute the sediment to where its needed (aka diversions)[1]. So I'm hopeful we'll be able to stop and maybe reverse the damage being done

[0] https://www.nola.com/news/environment/article_3128024a-cc03-... [1] https://coastal.la.gov/midbarataria/

An older, maybe more impressive example (just because of the age of it, or maybe because of my interest in it) is the hydrological systems built in Rome itself. I'll have to dig out the book I read this out of, but there is some evidence that a large part of what was the Forum was man made and made of infill, with the Cloaca Maxima [1] (which is still around and working) built to attempt to manage flooding from the Tiber. The Tiber is a silt heavy river, and the sewers requried pretty constant maintenance.

When the Cloaca Maxima was blocked with silt sometime int he early Middle Ages, the Forum began flooding again and ended up buried by modern times under a significant amount of soil. See pictures [2] and [3] of the same structure from (a painting) in the 1800s and modern day after the excavation. It really shows the power of nature and the success of engineering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima [2] Before: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Canalett... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ro...

They did an impressive job with the Guadalquivir in Seville:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1rsena_del_Guadalquivir#...

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1rsena_del_Guadalquivir#...

The river used to run through the city centre, and flooded a lot. So they diverted most of the flow past the city, leaving the stretch inside effectively a huge dock.

John McPhee's 1989 book "The Control of Nature" has a long section on the work the United States Corps of Engineers did to try to control the flow of the Mississippi. Most of the time it works more or less as designed. But once in while the system can't handle it and the excess is sent down the course of the Atchafalaya river and floods the Atchafalaya Basin all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

I guess you are being downvoted because you are saying that Libya was better off before Obama "saved" it.

Seriously fuck him for his warmongering, he should be rotting in jail for what he did.

I am pretty sure I deleted this comment. I waited 20 min and the comment never showed up. Then I assumed I am shadowbanned or something on this account because of negative karma.... So I deleted this and posted it on the other account.

Appologies for the mess up.

Another thing ? How can I request full account deletion from hacker news ?

It seems to be struggling currently, but certainly it's already proven to be a resilient piece of infrastructure given the circumstances:

On 22 July during the 2011 Libyan civil war, one of the two plants making pipes for the project, the Brega Plant, was hit by a NATO air strike.[18] At a press conference on 26 July, NATO claimed that rockets had been fired from within the plant area, and that military material, including multiple rocket launchers, was stored there according to intelligence findings, presenting a photo showing a BM-21 MRL as an example.[19]

During the second Libyan civil war, lasting from 2014 to 2020, the water infrastructure suffered neglect and occasional breakdowns. As of July 2019, 101 of 479 wells on the western pipeline system had been dismantled.[20]

On 10 April 2020, a station controlling water flow to Tripoli and neighboring towns was seized by an unknown armed group. The flow of water was cut to over two million people as a result, and as such the attack was condemned by the United Nations on humanitarian grounds.[21]

"During the second Libyan civil war, lasting from 2014 to 2020, the water infrastructure suffered neglect and occasional breakdowns. As of July 2019, 101 of 479 wells on the western pipeline system had been dismantled"

It is not all gone and still somewhat working, but how long?

Remind me again why the fuck Obama rallied NATO to fuck that country up again and how Obama is still seen as the messiah to socialist and progressives after doing that?

Similar perhaps, the rather extensive rail network in Middle East and Arabian Peninsula which were blown up in the First World war, most of it was never mended.