Another Israel/San Diego Connection

In addition to that of my daughter, San Diego, California has another Israel connection: Israel is helping desalinate San Diego's water supply. 

As many of us know, water is a most precious natural resource in the Middle East, and in past years there has been a fairly severe drought, in Israel and other countries in the region, due to lower rainfall.  This winter with its powerful storms of a couple of weeks ago, which brought snow to the higher elevations (I heard from friends who visited me on Shabbat that approximately 6 inches fell in Efrat, where they and my son and his family live) and pounding rain to central Israel, including flooding in Tel Aviv, has gone a long way to ease that drought, and raise the level of the largest body of fresh water in Israel, the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), almost to it's high water mark.

The Middle East is not the only region with severe water problems.  I never expected, however,  that one of those areas would be San Diego:

The greater San Diego region is presently suffering from acute shortages in fresh water. The San Diego County Water Authority has stated that they are presently in a crisis. According to the UCSD Center for Environmental Economics, California’s water crisis exists because of drought, rapid population growth, historical over-use of water resources, and the general overall neglect of the environment. Desalination can effectively address this issue, by increasing the amount of water that is available to the population.

So again it is Israel--in this case, with its advanced technology in water desalinization--to the rescue, of an American city, no less.

IDE Americas Inc., a subsidiary of Israel’s IDE Technologies Ltd., is to engage in the largest desalination plant construction project to ever hit the western United States. Israel’s IDE Technologies Ltd will be building a 204,412-cubic-meter seawater desalination plant for the greater San Diego region. The $922 million construction plan, otherwise known as the Carlsbad Desalination Project, is being administered by Poseidon Resources LP, a subsidiary of Poseidon Water LLC, and will be carried out in partnership with the San Diego County Water Authority.

  When the desalination plant is completed, it will be the largest water desalination plant in the United States.  This is not the first time, nor the last, that Israel has come to the aid of various countries in science or technology:

According to Avshalom Felber, CEO of IDE Technologies Ltd., “The Carlsbad Desalination Project is a significant milestone for us, California and the US at large; as we believe it will set the stage for the future of desalination in America. For decades, we’ve successfully completed similar projects in countries all over the world, and we’re excited to be a part of what will be the largest desalination plant in the US.”
IDE Technologies Ltd. has built and operated some of the world’s largest desalination plants, including one in China, and presently provides over the distribution of 2.3 million cubic meters of water per day around the world. This Israeli desalination company has thus far worked on 400 desalination plants in over 40 different countries, and thus has sought to significantly address water problems in many arid locations across the planet.

Just another day in the life of a tiny country, doing big things aiding humanity in the Twenty-First Century.