The Torogh dam serving Iran's second city of Mashhad has gone out of service due to low water, leaving the metropolis without another of its main supply reservoirs, Hamshahri Online reported on August 26.

The loss is part of the deepening water crisis across Iran, where years of drought, collapsing snowpack and decades of over-building have pushed reservoirs feeding major cities to critical lows, with Mashhad's larger Doosti dam already reported below 5% of capacity.

Mashhad governor Seyed Hasan Hosseini told a press conference that the Torogh dam had dropped out of the water-supply network, and appealed to media to help build support for financing the city's water projects.

The Torogh dam sits about 14 km southeast of Mashhad on the Torogh river, near the old Torogh weir, in Khorasan Razavi province. It is the second Mashhad dam to go offline within the week.

Khorasan Razavi governor Gholamhossein Mozaffari said days earlier that the Doosti dam, once the main source of water for Mashhad, had effectively dropped out of the city's primary supply network after a sharp fall in reserves.

Iran's water emergency has been building for years, with dozens of dams across its most populous provinces below 10% of capacity and reservoirs supplying Tehran running so low that President Masoud Pezeshkian has raised the prospect of partial evacuation of the capital.

Officials attribute the crisis to consecutive droughts, falling rainfall and rising temperatures, compounded by mismanagement of some 600 dams and water-intensive agriculture that consumes more than 90% of national supply.