Evaluating Water Table Rising Under Eastern Cairo (Metro Line)

Abstract

The booming increase in population in last decades led to poor environmental condition in some areas in the capital city of Egypt. The main two tackled environmental impacts from the increased population, in this research, are the heavy traffic densities jam and groundwater rise in many areas in the city. The massive population causes traffic congestion in the capital due to the increased poor planned urban expansion. The groundwater rise is resulted from leakage from over loeaded and poorly maintained drinking and sanitary water networks. More than 40% of the capacity of these networks leaked to ground, moving, with the topographic gradient sub-surfable  to the lower areas; transporting all pollutants and dissolved salts from soil to the aquifer. This, also, threatens the buildings stability and prevent the usability of these buildings. The government is currently exerting massive efforts and increasing the investments tremendously on solving the traffic congestions and implementing new roads. Zooming into the study area, replacing the non-working old metro track into a road to link between Mansheyet El-Bakry and El-Demrdash is faced with the high groundwater table occurring in the area. The main objective of the current research is, to evaluate the proposed alternatives for solving the traffic problem through implementing new road, taking into consideration conducting a suitable solution for the high groundwater table. Moreover, investigating the main causes of the groundwater rise and assess environmentally the impact on the study area. Several proposed alternatives were evaluated for solving the concerned issues through extensive field and hydrogeological investigations, pumping tests, and numerical model (GMS- modflow) to simulate the hydrogeological conditions of the study area and test the proposed solutions. The alternatives were, also, assessed through a designed weighted impact assessment to analyze the best solution. the weighting assessment factors include efficiency, initial and operational costs, extracted water volume, lower groundwater rise, building stability, construction feasibility. The comprehensive investigation and assessment indicated that the most effective solution.  Nevertheless, prevention at source is also urgently needed through rehabilitation of drinking and sanitary water networks in the capital to minimize the seepage and losses percentage of the transported water.

Keywords:Groundwater Rise, Cairo, traffic congestions, dewatering system, groundwater modeling, groundwater quality

DOI: 10.7176/CER/14-6-03

Publication date:October 31^st 2022