WHAT IT ENTAILS

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 123, 21 November 1932, Page 3

WHAT IT ENTAILS

THE WHITE NILE DAM

ENORMOUS COST

The" Egyptian . Parliament some months ago approved" the scheme to build a huge dam afiross the White' Nile at Jebel Aulia, ia point about fifty miles south, of Khartum.

This will form a tremendous reservoir, which will allow the flow of water in tho lower reaches of the Nile to be so regulated as to maintain irrigation along its banks even in the dry months, and, if the highest hopes are fulfilled, may result in the production of two crops a year instead of one. The dam is to have a capacity of 4,000,000,000 cubic yards, and the cost is estimated at about £10,000,000, says the "San Francisco Chronicle."

Ibrahim Fahmy Pasha, Egyptian Minister of• Public Works,' says: "We are proposing to follow the construction of this dam with two further sections of work. First of all there is a scheme by which we shall short-circuit the Nile in its upper reaches. There is a vast swampy area of hundreds of millions of acres known as the Sudd district. Here the Nile lies out in shallow pools, exposed to the equatorial sun, and as a result is wasted through evaporation and by seepage till threequarters of the. volume from the north of Lake Albert is lost. A LONG TASK. "This we shall cut completely out of the Nile course by the construction of waterways, bringing the river down to a point where it can flow in undiminished volume to the Khartoum dam. It has meant years of exploration and survey work, but we have at last got a workable scheme evolved. It will cost from £15,000,000 to £20,000,000 and will take twenty years to complete. "Meanwhile we shall be building another barrage, this time: at tho north of Lake Albert. This will enable us to raise tho level of the lake about teu feet and will give us an inexhaustible supply of water that we can regulate so as to give a regular flow of fresh water oven in tho dryest months of the year." The problems that have to be tackled in regard to all these schemes are, of course, enormous, including the purely technical questions coucerning the ■ river's flow and content and tile complicated problems of co-ordination between the authorities concerned. The countries concerned in this scheme are Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, and —in regard to the proposed dam at the end of Lake Albert—the Belgian Congo, whoso frontier lies on the western coast of the lake.