From the Firehose: Fire Burns in a Forgotten Oasis
If you click into satellite view in any map and type “Egypt” into the search bar, your screen will quickly glow with the golden hues of desert sand. On the right, you’ll see the River Nile — and it’s halo of lush greenery — stretching vertically from Cairo downward to Sudan. And there in the south-western part of the country, surrounded by endless desert, appears a patch of circular fields, seemingly plopped down by accident. This is the new city of Toshka, located in the New Valley Governorate.
The history of Toshka is just as interesting as it’s location, if not the cause. As Bradley Hope of The National reported in 2012:
Toshka was designed in 1997 as the beginning of the relocation of 20 per cent of Egypt’s 85 million citizens to a “new” Nile valley, using water pumped from Lake Nasser to irrigate the barren sands of the Western Desert.
It was to be Hosni Mubarak’s grandest legacy — an answer to Egypt’s crowded cities, pollution, food shortages and unemployment problems all addressed in one mega-project.
However, it appears that all that started well, did not end well. The article continues:
A half-hour drive south from the “New City of Toshka” reveals the meagre results of Mubarak’s pharaonic ambitions 15 years later. There are only 21,000 hectares of farmland, less than 10 per cent of the goal. None of the cities, factories, schools or hospitals have been built. Most produce is exported for the benefit of the private companies that bought land there.
While the details of this remote desert location are unfortunate, the images of Toshka captured by our satellites are striking. From Planet’s firehose feed this image from May 12th, 2016 jumped off the screen.
From space, there is always something eye-opening to see on Earth’s surface. On the ground, these images act as insightful data that power businesses across many markets. While reports on Toshka indicate little activity, our imagery suggests at least one individual is preparing his field for work.
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