A RELUCTANT WATER CHIEF
After a few years of bumming around kibbutzim during the early 1930s, Simcha Blass opened a Tel Aviv office as an engineering consultant. The private sector suited his fast pace, disdain for mediocrity, and somewhat irascible disposition. There he planned and supervised implementation of water development projects for the settlements of the Yishuv. From its in-ception in 1937, Mekorot hired him on a retainer to serve as its Chief Engineer. Blass designed most of its major initiatives, beginning with the Kishon River irrigation project.[6]
As soon as the war was over, Blass was ready to pick up where he had left off as a consultant. Haim Halpren, the Director of the nascent Ministry of Agriculture, had other ideas. He offered Blass a job running the Water Department. As the Mandate's Water Directorate had been based in the agriculture department, functionally it meant putting Blass in charge of the country's water resources. Blass was friendly with many of the ministers in the new cabinet, who well knew his outspoken and impa-tient demeanor. They told him that he might last a few weeks as a civil ser-vant. Blass was inclined to agree but had heard a rumor of who the alter-native candidate for the position was. Blass felt him to be so incompetent he accepted the offer and stayed at the job for four years.[7]
The country was short on everything. The first thing Blass did was to order pipes, which were unavailable locally. The Ministry of Finance and its foreign-currency-conscious clerks felt that any more than thirty thousand tons of pipe a year would be wasted. Blass ordered ninety thousand, but these soon ran out.[8] In 1949 Israeli soldiers stormed southward, reached the Red Sea, and conquered Eilat without a shot. Then they discovered that there was nothing there for them to drink. The army began to desalinate seawater, using a crude, high-energy process that cost six cents a cup, or 240 dollars a cubic meter—more than a thousand times the cost of well water.
Despite the hassles, these were exciting times for water engineers. After being limited to a small percentage of Palestine's lands, they suddenly had the water resources of an entire country at their disposal. More than 75 percent of the freshwater supply came from three sources: Lake Kinneret, which receives the waters of the Jordan River watershed; the Coastal Aquifer, stretching down the Mediterranean coast from Haifa through the Gaza Strip; and the Yarkon-Taninim, or Mountain Aquifer, which runs parallel to the Coastal Aquifer to the east.[10] This much was clear in 1948. What Israel's first water managers did not know was how much water these three reservoirs contained.
The few experts with hydrological expertise sensed that the 248 million cubic meters of water utilized was only a fraction of the recharge potential available, although they had no idea of what that fraction was. Characteristically they were overly optimistic and guessed that with full development, supply might one day reach 3.5 billion cubic meters of water a year.[11] Israel's replenishable volume is now thought to be roughly half that amount.[12] Hazarding long-term estimates was something of an in-dulgence. Within eighteen months of independence the country's popula-tion had grown by 50 percent.[13] The new nation needed more water, and drinking water was the least of it:The Israeli farmer was impatient to stake his claim.
During the 1950s Israel's agricultural development was astonishing, showing over 500 percent growth in yields. Such growth was based solely on groundwater.[14] With its high water table, the Coastal Aquifer was the easiest resource to tap. Dozens of wells were drilled.[15] The environmental problems caused by this burst of productivity were already clear, but as Blass would later write, the exigencies of the period overrode even prudent professionals' sense of caution:
Lack of food during the first years of the state caused speedy development of water sources that could be achieved through shallow wells. In this frantic effort, exploitation of the Western part of the coast was particularly prominent. It was the necessity of the time,
Overpumping leads to pollution, not only because of the vacuum (slowly filled by seawater) created when the water table drops, but also be-cause the natural flow of water to the sea, flushing salts and minerals out of the aquifer, is interrupted. When Tel Aviv's wells became too salty for drinking in the mid-1950s, it was a harbinger of things to come.[17]