Birlestik, Kazakhstan – In the dried-up harbor of this dusty village, camels roam next to forlorn ships seemingly washed up by tides of sand.
Near the rusting hulks, a camel herder dreams of what once was – and what might be.
“They say that maybe there will be water here again,” Dosym Kutmambetov, the 27-year- old grandson of a fisherman, said as he paused from rounding up his family’s herd. “We’re dreaming that the water will be here very soon.
“It makes my heart glad. If the sea is full, more people will come back to the village and life will be richer. If the sea comes back, I’ll catch fish too.”
The hope is not just wishful thinking.
Over the past half-century, the Aral Sea shrank to less than half its original size and turned salty as irrigation diversion slowly drained what was once one of the world’s largest lakes. Like a gigantic amoeba, the landlocked sea split in two in the late 1980s.
The shrinkage not only wiped out a large fishing industry but blanketed the region with toxic saline dust blown up from the dry seabed.
Now, thanks to a new 8-mile- wide dam and other projects by the Kazakh government and the World Bank, the northern part of the Aral is filling again with fresh water. That in turn is restoring hope and a modest degree of prosperity to a region devastated by the double whammy of a disappearing sea and the Soviet collapse.
Fat carp flop wildly as fishermen pull nets tight around them, and salted fish hang to dry in the semidesert region’s processing plants.
“I’m happy. The sea is coming near my village. I had a son born yesterday. And along with the sea, the fish come to the nets,” Zhanarbek Kelmaganbetov, 30, said as he paused from hauling in 2-foot carp near the new dam.
The southern sea, which lies mostly in Uzbekistan, continues to shrink and is too salty to sustain even ocean fish. Instead of trying to reverse the environmental damage there, Uzbekistan’s government is seeking to find and develop gas and oil deposits in the dry seabed.
The dam that is restoring life to the northern sea, which lies entirely within Kazakhstan, has raised the water level there to 138 feet above sea level. That compares with an elevation of 126 feet last summer, before the dam was finished.
Residents take great pride in the reversal of what has long been considered one of the world’s greatest man-made environmental disasters. Such a dramatic ecological success is particularly rare in the former states of the Soviet Union, which have not had the resources to clean up past mistakes.
“There are seven wonders of the world, and the eighth is the dam on the Aral Sea,” said Kolbai Danabayev, vice mayor of Aral city, a former fishing harbor known in Soviet times by its Russian name, Aralsk. “No one has done something like this before.”
