The new Abu Dhabi Plan, the latest detailed five-year blueprint for the emirate’s social, economic and cultural development, was announced last week.
Designed to ensure that the nation achieves its long-term strategic goals, one of the plan’s focal points is the complex relationship between the emirate’s infrastructure, environment and its precious natural resources.
As this photograph shows however, the availability of Abu Dhabi’s most precious resource – fresh water – and the infrastructure associated with it, is a factor that has always determined the capital’s development.
Taken by John Vale, a Briton who worked in the oil industry in Abu Dhabi from the late 1950s, the photograph shows the drum-shaped tank, sat on top of an artificial mound. It was built in the early 1960s to receive water from a series of wells in Al Saad on the outskirts of Al Ain.
Described in a slightly overblown progress report from the time as “the big Abu Dhabi water tank which towers over the city on a hill”, the structure, which now sits forgotten and unnoticed in suburban Khalidiya, was responsible for delivering more than two million vital gallons a day to the capital by 1969.
* Nick Leech
