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The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. It travels for approximately 1,450 km (900 mi) through Ethiopia and Sudan. Along with the White Nile, it is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile and supplies about 85.6% of the water to the Nile during the rainy season.
The Aswan Dam, or more specifically since the 1980s, the Aswan High Dam, is one of the world's largest embankment dams, which was built across the Nile in Aswan, Egypt, between 1960 and 1970. When it was completed, it was the tallest earthen dam in the world, eclipsing the United States' Chatuge Dam. Its significance largely upstaged the previous Aswan Low Dam initially completed in 1902 downstream. Based on the success of the Low Dam, then at its maximum utilization, construction of the High Dam became a key objective of the new regime the Free Officers movement of 1952; with its ability to better control flooding, provide increased water storage for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity, the dam was seen as pivotal to Egypt's planned industrialization. Like the earlier implementation, the High Dam has had a significant effect on the economy and culture of Egypt.
Gezira, also spelt Al Jazirah, Al Jazeera and Al Jazira, is one of the 18 states of Sudan. The state lies between the Blue Nile and the White Nile in the east-central region of the country. It has an area of 27,549 km2. The name comes from the Arabic word for island. Wad Madani is the capital of the state. Gezira is known as an irrigated cotton-producing state as it is a well-populated area that is suitable for agriculture.
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Sir John Aird, 1st Baronet was an English civil engineering contractor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also served as Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Paddington North from 1887 to 1906, was the first Mayor of Paddington in 1900, and became an enthusiastic collector of British art.
The Gezira Scheme is one of the largest irrigation projects in the world. It is centered on the Sudanese state of Gezira, just southeast of the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers at the city of Khartoum. The Gezira Scheme was begun by the British while the area was governed as part of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Water from the Blue Nile is distributed through canals and ditches to tenant farms lying between the Blue and White Nile.
The flooding of the Nile has been an important natural cycle in Nubia and Egypt since ancient times. It is celebrated by Egyptians as an annual holiday for two weeks starting August 15, known as Wafaa El-Nil. It is also celebrated in the Coptic Church by ceremonially throwing a martyr's relic into the river, hence the name, The Martyr's Finger. The flooding of the Nile was poetically described in myth as Isis's tears of sorrow for Osiris when killed by his brother Set.
Sir William Willcocks was a British civil engineer during the high point of the British Empire. He was an irrigation engineer who proposed and built the first Aswan Dam, the scale of which had never been attempted previously. He later undertook other major irrigation projects in South Africa and in Arab regions of the dying Ottoman Empire.
The Sennar Dam is an irrigation dam on the Blue Nile near the town of Sennar in the Al Jazirah region of Sudan. The dam is 3,025 metres (9,925 ft) long and has a maximum height of 40 metres (130 ft). It was designed by the Scottish engineer Sir Murdoch MacDonald, begun in 1914 and completed in 1925 by the British contractor S Pearson & Sons.
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Sir Maurice Fitzmaurice CMG was an Irish civil engineer. He was apprenticed to Benjamin Baker and worked with him on the Forth Railway Bridge before going to Egypt to build the Aswan Dam for which he was appointed both a member of the Ottoman Order of the Mejidiye and a companion of the British Order of St Michael and St George. Following this Fitzmaurice was Chief Engineer to the London County Council and was responsible for the Blackwall, Rotherhithe and Woolwich tunnels. In later life his consultancy advised on docks and harbours across the British Commonwealth as well as the Sennar Dam in Sudan and he was recognised with the prestigious honour of the presidency of the Institution of Civil Engineers for the 1916-17 session.
The Egyptian Department of Public Works was established in the early 19th century, and concentrates mainly on public works relating to irrigation and hydraulic engineering. These irrigation projects have constituted the bulk of work performed by this entity in Egypt. During its almost 200-year history, the Egyptian Department of Public Works employed many notable engineers and constructed massive public works projects throughout the country. It became the most respected engineering entity and was regarded as the 'best school' for civil engineers in modern Egypt. Its history can be broken into three periods:
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The Aswan Low Dam or Old Aswan Dam is a gravity masonry buttress dam on the Nile River in Aswan, Egypt. The dam was built by the British at the former first cataract of the Nile, and is located about 1000 km up-river and 690 km south-southeast of Cairo. When initially constructed between 1899 and 1902, nothing of its scale had ever been attempted; on completion, it was the largest masonry dam in the world. The dam was designed to provide storage of annual floodwater and augment dry season flows to support greater irrigation development and population growth in the lower Nile. The dam, originally limited in height by conservation concerns, worked as designed, but provided inadequate storage capacity for planned development and was raised twice: between 1907 and 1912 and again between 1929 and 1933. These heightenings still did not meet irrigation demands and in 1946 it was nearly over-topped in an effort to maximize pool elevation. This led to the investigation and construction of the Aswan High Dam 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) upstream.
Water conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) primarily deals with three major river basins: the Jordan River Basin, the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin, and the Nile River Basin. The MENA region covers roughly 11.1 million square km. There are three major deserts in the MENA region:
Sir M MacDonald & Partners was a notable UK-based civil engineering consultancy during the 20th century. It was named after Sir Murdoch MacDonald, a Scottish-born civil engineer, and its establishment and early history was strongly associated with work in Egypt during the 1920s. In 1989, the company merged with Mott, Hay and Anderson to form Mott MacDonald, today a major international multidisciplinary consultancy.
Sudan had a modern irrigated agriculture sector totaling about 800,000 hectares in 2010, out of about 84 million hectares that were potentially arable. This was a slight decline from the prior year and well below the more than 2 million hectares of the early 1990s. The Nile and its tributaries were the source of water for 93 percent of irrigated agriculture, and of this, the Blue Nile accounted for about 67 percent. Gravity flow was the main form of irrigation, although pumps served part of the irrigated area.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 Chapple, Alfred. "Obituary: Oswald Longstaff Prowde (1885-1949)" (PDF). St John's Cambridge. Retrieved 15 May 2023.. From The Eagle, Easter 1950, pp. 205-207.
- ↑ Prowde, O L (1926). "The Gezira Irrigation Scheme, including the Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile". Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. 222 (1926): 81–89. doi:10.1680/imotp.1926.14156 . Retrieved 15 May 2023.
- ↑ Winchester, Clarence (1938). "Conquest of the Desert". Wonders of World Engineering. pp. 289–295. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
- ↑ "The Sennar Dam and the Gezira Irrigation Scheme" (PDF). The Engineer . 26 September 1924. pp. 348–350. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 January 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2015.
- 1 2 Farmer, Hugh. "Preece, Cardew and Rider – Consulting Engineers for Hok Un power station (9 January 2017)". The Industrial History of Hong Kong Group. Retrieved 15 May 2023.