Nile Valley (Aswan Dam). Archeological and Social Impact

The Nile River is one of the natural and romantic wonders of the world and the world's longest river, flowing 6,800 kilometers over 35 degrees of latitude. The Nile stops at the Sadd al-Aali, the High Dam at Aswan, the southern frontier of Egypt. Behind the dam lies the world's largest reservoir, Lakes Nasser and Nubia. Downstream from the dam, the Nile flows as a canal through Egypt to the Mediterranean.

In September 1952, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council decided to build a great dam at Aswan to be a monument to their revolution and to provide a constant supply of water for the future security of Egyptians. Engineering and environmental studies were followed by complicated political negotiations with the Sudan about the division of the water.

These negotiations were successfully concluded on 8 November 1959 by the Nile Waters Agreement, which made possible the beginning of construction. When the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to finance the dam in July 1956, the Russians agreed to do so in October 1958. On 9 January 1960 President Nasser detonated 9 metric tons of dynamite to demolish 18,100 metric tons of granite on the east bank of the Nile to begin construction of the High Dam.

The technical and engineering obstacles in building the world's largest dam were formidable. The flow of the Nile was predictable but difficult to control even for the Russian engineers with experience on powerful rivers in the Soviet Union. Millions of cubic meters of rock and sand had to be excavated, requiring the organization of Egyptian laborers unfamiliar with the Russians, who were working in an unfamiliar cultural and desert environment.

Egyptian contractors took over the construction and recruited over thirty thousand Egyptians to complete the High Dam in September 1970. President Anwar Sadat and President Nikolai Podgorny of Russia inaugurated the dam in January 1971. The dam provided water security for Egypt but at a great environmental cost.

Archeological Impact. After the decision to build the dam had been made, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched a massive international campaign in 1955 to presene the ancient temples, tombs, fortresses, and ruins of Nubian history that would be flooded by the great reservoir (482 kilometers long, 12.8 kilometers wide, and 6,600 square kilometers in area) behind the High Dam.

Archeologists and experts in restoration from twenty-three countries directed by an international committee of experts under the aegis of the Nubian Salvage Scheme rescued from oblivion an array of monuments at a cost of S87 million. Some temples, churches, and forts were moved to higher ground. Others were donated to foreign museums in gratitude for their cooperation in the project. The most dramatic rescue was that of the great temple of King Ramses II at Abu Simbel, which was cut into sections and carefully reconstructed above the reservoir, financed by donations of $19 million from many nations

Social Impact. The rescue of the monuments received international acclaim, but few people were concerned about the fifty thousand Nubians who were forced by the rising waters of the reservoir to leave their historic lands on the banks of the Nile. Their discontent was violent and suppressed by the Sudanese army.

They were forcibly relocated to the Sudanese town of Khashm al-Qirbah on the Atbara River, where they became rivals for the land with the traditional herdsmen of the Butana Plain, creating hostility between the immigrants and the owners of the land. The water to irrigate their land Comes from the Khashm al-Qirbah Dam, whose capacity has been drastically reduced by tlx- heavy sedimentation from Ethiopia that has severely aggravated the incompatible demands between the pastoral Shukri- yya of Sudan and the Nubian cultivators.

Environmental Impact. The environmental impact of the dam had long been studied but not fully realized until the dam's completion. The Nile carries 90 million metric tons of Ethiopian soil annually, depending on the volume of the Nile flood. Upon reaching the quiet waters of the reservoir the heavy silt is deposited at the head of Lake Nubia, the finer grains being deposited throughout the 482 kilometers of Lake Nasser.

Between 1978 and 1990 the Nile deposited a billion and a half cubic meters of soil into the first 160 kilometers of the reservoir. This enormous quantity of soil creates what hydrologists call "dead storage." As the reservoir inexorably fills with Ethiopian soil, the "live storage" of water steadily diminishes, giving the High Dam an estimated life of from four hundred to five hundred years.

Moreover, the reservoir is located in one of the most arid deserts in the world where evaporation consumes over 10 billion cubic meters of Nile water, or 12 percent of the total Nile flow, an enormous loss for Egyptians, who are always short of water. The water that remains in Like Nasser becomes semistagnant and cannot sustain large numbers of fish and plankton, which require oxygen from free-flowing waters for survival. The vast reservoir has become a major obstacle to the fierce sandstorms that blow out of the Western Egyptian Desert.

No longer able to pass over a free-flowing river, tons of sand accumulate in big dunes on the bank of the reservoir to add to the dead storage at its bottom. Below the reservoir in the Nubian sandstone south of Aswan is a network of fault lines that has been disturbed by the great weight of water over it. On 14 November 1981 an earthquake measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale occurred, and many locations recorded lesser earthquakes.

Economic Impact. When the nutrient-rich soils from Ethiopia could no longer pass through the dam to nourish their fields, Egyptians had to resort to expensive chemical fertilizers. Only sluggish water was running in northern Egypt to sweep away municipal, industrial, and agricultural waste. Salinity in the delta was increased by the intrusion of brackish water no longer flushed out to the Mediterranean by natural drainage, diminishing productivity in the delta.

Also, the absence of sediment has allowed the sea to intrude upon the coast, which has receded. Furthermore, without the annual addition of nutrients, the once profitable sardine industry of Egypt has become extinct. The Egyptian brick industry, which produced a billion bricks a year from Ethiopian sediment, now must buy at premium prices thousands of tons of precious Egyptian agricultural land.

Environmentally and hydrologically the Aswan Dam of the Nile River valley may be the wrong dam in the wrong place, but it has sustained the people of Egypt during the decade of drought in the 1980s, protected them from the enormous floods of the 1990s, and created the illusion that Egypt is free from the danger of being a hostage to upstream riparians from whose countries the Nile flows downstream to the High Dam at Aswan and Egypt.