High Dam of Aswan
Aswan Egypt’s “Nubia Egypt” is a great city. There are many temples and monuments in Aswan. The Nile River is where most of Egypt’s temples are located. Since ancient times, the Nile has flooded every year, making the land around it good for farming. However, as the flood levels rose, the crops were lost.
Then all of the temples fell down. So, in order to save the temples on the banks of the Nile, a dam had to be built. The High Dam is very important, and not just as a place for tourists to visit. It is also very important to the country as a whole.
How the Aswan High Dam came to be
In 1889, work on the first Aswan Dam, called the Lower Aswan Dam, began. In 1902, the Low Dam was done. The height of the Low Dam was 54 m, but it was later raised in two stages, from 1907 to 1912 and from 1929 to 1933.
In 1946, the Low Dam was about to break, so another dam was built 8 km upstream. During President Gamal Abd El-time Nasser’s in office, work on the new “High Dam of Aswan” began in 1952. At first, the US offered a loan of $270 million, but they took it back in the middle of 1956.
At the height of the Cold War, in 1958, the Soviet Union offered a $1.12 billion loan with 2% interest. In 1970, the building of the High Dam was done.
The Building of the High Dam in Aswan
13 km south of Aswan is where the High Dam is. It is 111 m tall and 3600 m long. It is 980 m wide at the bottom and 40 m wide at the top. Lake Nasser was made when the High Dam was built. It is thought to be the largest man-made lake in the world. Lake Nasser is 500 km long, 16 km wide, and 6 000 m2 in size.
The Aswan High Dam’s Good Points
The High Dam had an effect on the economy. It made a new fishing industry around Lake Nasser. The Dam has 12 generators that are each 174 megawatts. Because of this, it is an important source of hydroelectric power that provides half of Egypt’s electricity needs.
Ecological impact: The building of the Dam will have effects on the balance of the millennium, which will affect the animals, plants, and people’s economy. This is why some animal species went extinct.
Nearly 90,000 Nubians lost their homes when the Nasser Lake flooded after the High Dam was built.
What are the bad things that the Aswan High Dam does?
Because of filtration and evaporation, about 12 to 14 percent of the reservoir’s annual contribution is lost. Also, the reservoir’s storage capacity has gone down because sediments from the Nile River have filled it up.
Another effect on the environment is that when the dam was built, no one thought about how it would affect the wildlife and plants downriver.
There have been a lot of effects, like too much sediment in the water upstream, erosion downriver because the water doesn’t move as fast, the loss of animal species that moved along the river, and the salting of the Nile delta because the salty waters of the Mediterranean Sea seeped into the land from the coast to the mouth.
Also, the economy of the villages and the people who live there has been hurt because farmers have had to use almost a million tonnes of artificial fertilisers to make up for the nutrients that the flood and the sediments it carried, which are polluting the river, no longer give them.
Pesticides are getting into the river and making it dirty. In the same way, the number of fish has gone down, which has also hurt the economy.
Aswan Tours with Egypt via travel
The Unfinished Obelisk and the Temple of Philae are two great places to visit in Aswan that draw a lot of tourists. You can also cruise down the Nile to see the sights of Luxor and Aswan while enjoying the beautiful views of the pure Nile, or you can book one of our Egypt vacation packages to learn more.
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