Peru bores through Andes to water desert [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Peru bores through Andes to water desert
Published: 8:52AM Friday April 05, 2013 Source: Reuters

Peru's Olmos Valley might be a desert now, with rare rains and rivers that trickle to life for just a few months a year, but a radical engineering solution for water scarcity could soon create an agricultural bonanza here.

Fresh water that now tumbles down the eastern flank of the Andes mountains to the Amazon basin and eventually the Atlantic Ocean will instead move west through the mountains to irrigate this patch of desert on Peru's coast. It will then drain into the Pacific Ocean.

The Herculean project to reverse the flow of water and realise a century-old dream is in many ways the most important water work ever in Peru. It could serve as a blueprint for the kind of construction projects needed to tackle worsening water scarcity.

Call it extreme engineering in the age of global warming.

"All of this will be green," said engineer Giovanni Palacios, looking out over miles of brown shrubbery at a
construction site he oversees for the Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

More:
http://tvnz.co.nz/technology-news/peru-bores-through-andes-water-desert-5395386