The Moroccan government has decided to set up a ministerial commission tasked with drawing up a new strategy aimed at ensuring the country’s water security.
The creation of this ad-hoc commission was ordered by King Mohammed VI. Thus, “the issue of water has became a priority and strategic matter for the government”, said Thursday Prime Minister Saadeddine El Othmani.
In recent months, some Moroccan village dwellers had expressed anger against the difficulty of accessing drinking water, the delays experienced by some water supply projects or the poor quality of the water.
According to latest official statistics, Morocco has 140 large dams with a capacity exceeding 17.6 billion m3 and several thousand boreholes and wells to capture groundwater. These dams helped secure the drinking water supply for Moroccan communities and develop a large-scale modern irrigation system which supported the country’s competitive agricultural sector.
Yet, the water sector continues to face difficulties due to depletion of water resources, flash floods, cycles of droughts and over exploitation of groundwater resources.
To address these challenges and ensure the country’s water security, the Moroccan government worked in 2015 a National Water Plan (PNE) which seeks to provide universal access to drinking water, improve the output of drinking water supply networks and water use efficiency.
It also seeks to enhance water storage, boost desalination projects, encourage the reuse of treated wastewater, and the possibility of transferring water from areas having excess to those suffering shortage.

On Wednesday, roughly two weeks after Hurricane Maria struck, just 50 percent of Puerto Rico had access to drinking water and only 5.4 percent had electricity. That information was clearly displayed on Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website on disaster relief efforts in the U.S. territory.
FEMA explained to the Post that the information is still available in Spanish on a website maintained by the Puerto Rican government, www.status.pr. However, there was no comment about why the information was deleted from the main FEMA page.
Ricardo Rosselló’s office, FEMA spokesman William Booher said.
One subsection, which previously reported on electricity access, titled "Power Restoration and Fuel Impacts" was removed entirely. Other bullet points, including one reporting on water access, and a schematic titled "LOGISTICS SNAPSHOT for HURRICANE MARIA" were also removed.
President Trump and his administration have received intense criticism over his handling of the crisis in Puerto Rico as recovery efforts moves at a "glacial pace."

SSC Services expects a newly renovated irrigation system will save the university about 80,000 gallons of water annually. While the savings will be more environmental than financial, company representatives say they are conceptually "reinvesting" those savings by awarding six Texas A&M System students $1,950 scholarships to build wells in underdeveloped areas of the world.
Crawford said the system is installed but is still being calibrated.
But Crawford said the idea is to lead by example.
The scholarships to send A&M students to El Salvador were established in this same spirit of giving Aggies opportunities to practice the values they preach.
The group alternated between drilling for the well and teaching a class on subjects such as how to avoid germs and having a healthy diet.
She said residents of the El Salvadoran village the A&M students visited had been without a well since the previous one was overwhelmed by a flood eight years ago. With no running water and a contaminated well, Bourey said many residents got their water from rainwater collections and pools of water that accumulated near a river.
"These pools are open, they are right on the side of the road, they are open to anything drinking out of them — a lot of the dogs that were in the village would drink out of them."

But several cardboard boxes placed at the festival’s western end put a more somber note on this year’s festivities as they filled with emergency supplies for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.
“We want Puerto Ricans to know that they do matter and they have representation here,” said Magalye Matos, a volunteer helping lead the donation drive.
Less than 1 in 8 Puerto Ricans have electricity and slightly over half have access to drinking water, according to the latest metrics from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It’s hard to see your people going through something like this,” Matos said.
Almost 30 percent of the city’s population identified as Hispanic or Latino in the 2010 U.S. census.
Many of them packed into Mexican, Salvadoran and Colombian restaurants on West Palisade Avenue on Saturday to celebrate their heritage.
“It’s about unity,” she said.

If you go to FEMA’s website detailing the federal response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, you’ll probably come away thinking that Puerto Ricans are in good hands and the relief effort is going well.
Of course, that’s because they removed a pair of noteworthy statistics that might damage that perception.
The Washington Post reported today that FEMA removed statistics about the availability of drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico from its website.
More than 30 miles of roadway have been cleared, up from about 20 miles earlier in the week. About 65 percent of grocery stores have reopened, along with nearly all hospitals and dialysis centers. And 64 percent of wastewater treatment plants are working on generator power.
The Spanish-language site maintained by the office of the Puerto Rican governor, Ricardo Roselló, shows that just over half of the island has access to clean drinking water, and only ten percent of it has access to electricity at the time of this writing. These statistics show that recovery efforts in Puerto Rico aren’t all sunshine and rainbows—significant progress hasn’t even been made on getting Puerto Rican citizens clean water.
Trump has, in fact, made a concerted effort to blame Puerto Rico itself for the slowness of the recovery, pointing the finger at everything from their outdated power grid to the attitude of the people themselves.

SCOTCH PLAINS, NJ — Scotch Plains James Leitner has been carrying 90 pounds of water over more than 3,000 miles across the United States to raise funds and spread awareness for the water issues many people face all around the world, but specifically in Tanzania.
He will finish his six month trek on Friday in San Francisco.
It is the same distance someone in Tanzania has to walk for water in a year.
After his time there, he went southwest to Denver, Colorado and over the Rockies into the desert of Utah and Nevada before arriving in California.
However, this isn’t the first extreme adventure for Leitner, who ran a marathon every month last year while carrying 45 pounds of water on his head for the same mission.
To donate to Leitner’s journey or for more information visit missioncleanwater.com.
Email alexis.tarrazi@patch.com.
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(CNN) – An "unprecedented" cholera outbreak in Yemen is now considered the worst in modern history.
The situation is only expected to worsen.
Access for journalists into Yemen is extremely limited, but the International Rescue Committee is one organization on the inside trying to help.
War forced 8-year-old Wajidah and her family from their home in the besieged city of Taez three months ago.
"When the missiles came, and the fighting… we fled. We’re living in a kind of no-man’s land now."
Her situation is like 2 million others displaced by sickness and war, many of whom live with little access to clean water.

By Thursday morning, both of those key metrics were no longer on the Web page.
FEMA spokesman William Booher noted that both measures are still being reported on a website maintained by the office of Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, www.status.pr. According to that website, which is in Spanish, 9.2 percent of the island now has power and 54.2 percent of residents have access to drinking water.
“Our mission is to support the governor and his response priorities through the unified command structure to help Puerto Ricans recover and return to routines. Information on the stats you are specifically looking for are readily available” on the website maintained by the governor’s office, Booher said.
The statistics that are on the FEMA page, as of Thursday afternoon, include these: There are now 14,000 federal workers on the ground in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, up from 12,300 earlier in the week. All airports, federally maintained ports and post offices are open.

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He’s a scientist, member of the local wastewater authority and founding member of a volunteer steering committee dedicated to environmental health. Together, elders in the community decide how they can most improve the health of their people and find ways to make it happen.
Mari Eggers is an environmental health researcher with Montana State University in Bozeman and fellow committee member.
Andreini said he often hears government officials and politicians say they don’t understand how tribal governance and systems work, challenging their ability to come up with solutions.
Andrea Gerlak, a University of Arizona water policy researcher, said that newer models of complex financing that have come as a result of government agency cuts – such as loans, bonds and public-private partnerships – don’t always work for poor, disenfranchised communities.
She drives hundreds of miles every day along dirt roads, filling up 5-gallon drums so Navajo families can drink safe water.

AMMAN: For nearly a week, the flow of Jordanian-supplied water to a remote displacement camp on Syria’s southern border has been mostly cut off, sources on the ground told Syria Direct on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of residents with reduced access.
Officially, water reaches the Rukban camp—home to roughly 60,000 displaced Syrians—via two water pumps based directly across the border in Jordan.
The reason for the cutoff is "maintenance work" on the pump, Mohammad Jarrah, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army-aligned Maghawir a-Thawra militia told Syria Direct from Rukban. His faction maintains a presence in the camp, where fighters claim they work to “secure” the informal settlement.
A UN official who spoke with Syria Direct on Thursday confirmed “ongoing maintenance work” on the broken water pump.
The second pump supplying water into the camp, though reportedly still functional, is located some seven kilometers away from Rukban, and overseen—though unofficially—by rebel factions who demand a steep price for filling up there, a former camp official told Syria Direct during the last cutoff in June.
“Water from the well costs around SP1,200 [approximately $2] per 200-liter barrel,” a-Darbas added—still an exorbitant cost for Rukban’s impoverished, displaced residents. “And the water itself tastes of sulfur. It’s disgusting."
This week, even residents resorting to expensive, questionable local well water from sellers outside the camp often returned to their tents in Rukban empty handed.