Aswan Dam
The biggest single change on the Nile in all its history
was the building of the Aswan's dam in Egypt. It took ten years to build and
was completed in 1970.
The Dam is 114 metres high and 3.6 kilometres long. Upstream, it creates a
reservoir of water, called Lake Nasser,which stretches back for 270 kilometres
into northern
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Sudan. Before the reservoir was made, the land was the home of 100,000
farming people who had to be given new houses and land, irrigated from the lake,
above the new water level.
Controlling The Flood
The most important change that the Dam brought about was that it made the annual flooding of the Nile valley in Egypt a thing of the past. The floodwaters are now trapped in Lake Nasser behind the dam, and their flow into the valley can be controlled. This has enabled more land in the valley to be irrigated, partly to feed Egypt's growing population, which doubled from 14 to 28 million between 1925 and 1950. (It had doubled again by 1995 and is expected to reach 68 million by the year 2000.) Egypt also needed more land for crops that could be exported, such as cotton and fruit.
The High Dam was also designed to meet Egypt's other urgent need as its leaders tried to
modernise the country energy. By the 1980s, the generators driven by water flowing through the dam
were providing half of Egypt's electricity, but by the 1990s this proportion had fallen as energy
demands grew.
Plus And Minus
The Dam was a successful project, giving Egypt and northern Sudan extra farmland and providing electricity for Egyptian cities. Lake Nasser has created a flourishing fishing industry, which produces 25,000 tonnes of fish a year and has a target of 100,000 tonnes by the year 2000.
But some other results of the project are not so good. Sediment from the Nile is held back behind the dam, and experts say that over the next 100 years Lake Nasser will steadily fill with silt. If this happens, the water level would rise and the lake would overflow, making new irrigation work urgently necessary. Some experts even fear that the weight of sediment could eventually break the dam, which would bring major disaster to Egypt, with huge damage and loss of life.
Meanwhile, as much as ten per cent of the water flowing into Lake Nasser is lost through evaporation
into the dry, hot air. This is water Egypt cannot afford to lose. In the valley below Aswan, the dam has
altered the Egyptians' traditional way of farming. The building of this dam solved some of Egypt's
immediate problems, but may have stored up others for the future.
Extract from “Great Rivers: The Nile”. Written by Michael Pollard,
London, Evans Brothers Limited, 1997.
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