Hammams closed and car washes closed three days a week in Morocco
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On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in Tangier, Meknes and Casablanca it will be impossible to use drinking water even to irrigate plants or gardens.
Nurserymen are included.
To deal with the extraordinary period of drought, the governors of the most affected regions in Morocco are dictating drastic measures.
Only in this way can the quantity of drinking water needed every day by the inhabitants of the three cities be ensured.
Morocco consumes around 1.6 billion cubic meters of drinking water every year, mostly supplied by the national electricity agency, Onee, in addition to desalination stations.
A circular from the Ministry of the Interior, dated December 26, has shown the way: it is forbidden to water green spaces and public gardens every day, it is forbidden to clean the streets with water, it is forbidden to fill public or private swimming pools more than once a year, and crops under the control of the Department of Agriculture.
The drought has now been continuous since 2019 and the risk of the fifth year is considered very high by experts, in parallel the demand for water is increasing which will reach 1.8 billion cubic meters per year starting from 2025 and almost 2 billion from 2030. Drinking water remains the absolute priority, the rest goes to the agricultural sector.
Until the early 2000s, Morocco received 120 to 140 billion cubic meters of precipitation annually.
Between the heat and the dispersion, 18 billion remained to be used or set aside in dammed basins and 4 billion filled the underground aquifers.
Global warming has changed conditions.
Morocco now has 12.5 billion cubic meters of water.
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