Abstract
With over 50 percent of Israel’s heavy chemical production housed in the giant Ramat Hovav industrial park in the Negev, the locale has become a major hub for studying and remedying toxic waste pollution. Although a national hazardous waste treatment center was established at Ramat Hovav in 1975, the facility experienced an ever widening gap between its relatively primitive treatment technologies and the amounts of incoming waste requiring detoxification. In the late 1980s pollution was found to be leaking into the soil and moving down into the groundwater. Because Ramat Hovav is situated at the upper part of the Besor drainage basin, toxic materials could eventually migrate downstream with seasonal floodwaters or through groundwater reserves, with pollution ending up in the southern coastalaquifer, an important source of potable water in Israel. Faced with this danger, Israel’s academic community took on the challenge of probing the geology and hydrology of Ramat Hovav terrain, and their implications for local and regional aquifer pollution. The researchers were led by hydrologist Prof. Eilon Adar of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at the Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and by the late hydrogeologist Prof. Ronit Nativ of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This comprehensive project in ecological hydrology has been carried out for almost two decades by Israeli scientists, often in collaboration with foreign researchers. Their investigations of the chalk bedrock underlying Ramat Hovav, the fractures crossing it, and the low-lying aquifer at its depth have advanced our theoretical understanding of how these elements interact to transfer and store the area’s relatively meager rainfall. This knowledge has enabled the development of approaches carried out by the Ramat Hovav Local Industrial Council to ameliorate subsurface environmental pollution. In particular, the use of endemic bacteria to break down specific pollutants in the chalk fractures has been demonstrated under laboratory conditions. The Ramat Hovav project is a multidisciplinary scientific effort that is applying expertise in geology, ecology, hydrology, microbiology, and chemistry. The collaboration between the BIDR and Hebrew University researchers in various disciplines has been aided by the cooperation of the Ramat Hovav chemical concerns that produce toxic wastes, as well as of the governing regional and local industrial councils. This enterprise illustrates a unique interaction of academia, industry, and government in the ongoing search to contain, and later to reduce groundwater pollution in a major chemical manufacturing zone.
Why Ramat Hovav?
Environmental damage appears
Probing Ramat Hovav pollution
Flow in chalk fractures
Monitoring aquifer pollution
Particle transport in fractured chalk
Remediating Groundwater
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