The Hormozgan Province representative has announced that 30 townships in the Minab region of the province are now surrounded by sinkholes and he called on the Ministry of Power to resolve the situation.
Abdolkarim Hashemi told the Mehr News Agency: “Minab has been visited by experts and provincial officers and they say the situation is far beyond a crisis at this point.”
He said the land in Minab can subside at any time, which could lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives.
Hashemi stressed that silence and inaction on the part of the authorities will continue to jeopardize people’s lives.
He said any form of water extraction from the Minab Dam or underground waters in the region should be halted immediately.
The excessive exploitation of underground waters in many regions of Iran has resulted in collapsing terrain and holes that are one to two metres wide and many more metres deep.
The Ministry of Power says of 609 fields in the country, 330 have a negative balance of water, meaning that more water is extracted from them than what they receive each year.
