EMERGENCY: Attica Declared in State of Emergency | To Endiaferon

Drought: SOS for water reserves in Mornos – “Athenians will have to move”

“The immediate thing that needs to be done now is to save water in the city and everywhere,” says Kimon Hadjimpiros, Emeritus Professor at NTUA.

Drought: Water reserves in Mornos are dangerously low

The Mornos River, which supplies water to Attica, is experiencing critically low water reserves, meaning that drought now directly threatens the capital region.

More specifically, according to a Skai report, the water level in the artificial lake of Mornos, which supplies Attica, has dropped so low that the submerged village of Kallio has been exposed once again. Drought now openly threatens the Attica basin.

“If the water level drops much further, it will be impossible to pump water. This means that the Athenians will have to move,” Kimon Hadjimpiros, Emeritus Professor at the National Technical University of Athens, characteristically told Skai.

The images, captured on August 18th by Mechanical Engineer Giorgos Chalkos and presented by Skai, are disheartening.

According to the Skai report, satellite images analyzed by the National Observatory of Athens, depicted on maps, showed the water-covered area of the artificial lake amounted to 16.6 square kilometers on July 12th, 2023. A year later, on July 16th, 2024, it decreased to 12.8 square kilometers.

“This is one of the times that the water level has dropped significantly. It has gone down before, but now it has dropped too much, the water level is very low, and the difference in height from the overflow is very large,” Mr. Chalkos said.

“Lake Mornos was constructed precisely to supply Athens. In the early 1990s, we experienced a major drought. Fortunately, the Evinos project, the lake of Evinos that supplies the lake of Mornos to bring water to Athens, had already started, and we believed then that the problem of Athens’ water supply had been definitively solved because the quantities of water available then were very large,” Mr. Hadjimpiros said and continued:

“The immediate thing that needs to be done now is to save water in the city and everywhere so that the little reserves we have are enough until this emergency passes. I remember in the past washing cars and verandas was forbidden, in other words, using water in ways that are not absolutely necessary. We can do without it for a while so that we have water to drink.”

It is noted that the drought sounded a loud alarm in Greece this year, due to the prolonged lack of rainfall, with experts particularly concerned and urging caution!