Will The Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia activate the Blue Nile Rift System and cause the annihilation of Northern Sudan and All Egypt.
The Blue Nile starts in the Ethiopian highlands and flows into the Sudans and Egypt. The dam poses a number of risks to these downstream neighbours; one reason for the growing tension is that these risks have not been properly analysed. Egypt has virtually no other sources of water for its people, and is already making do with less water per person than the international average. By at least one estimate, the Grand Renaissance reservoir could evaporate 3bn cubic meters of water a year – three times Egypt’s annual rainfall, and enough to meet the basic needs of up to half a million people. The reservoir could take 3-5 years to fill, reducing Egypt’s water supply by up to 25%. A Kenyan journalist writes: “If Egypt loses just 25% of the water it is receiving from the Nile, it could collapse.” Climate change, that cruelly unpredictable specter, will only intensify the region’s water conflicts.
The dam will be a 170 m (558 ft) tall, 1,800 m (5,906 ft) long gravity-type composed of roller-compacted concrete and will have two power houses, each on either side of the spillway. The left and right power houses will each contain 8 x 350 MW Francis turbine-generators. Supporting the dam and reservoir will be a 5 km (3 mi) long and 50 m (164 ft) high saddle dam. The dam's reservoir will have a volume of 63,000,000,000 m3 (51,074,931 acre·ft). This is now increased to 70,000,000,000 m3
Lori Pottinger stated that the megadam model is a dinosaur. Ethiopia would be better off leapfrogging over it to a more modern and efficient system, and find less provocative ways to assert its interests over the Nile waters. She went on to ask why is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam causing such strife? In addition to Egypt’s fears that it will reduce its lifeline of Nile waters, the tensions have been fanned by the project’s “SAD” planning process:
• Secretive: Although it is Africa’s biggest dam project and will have lasting impacts on its longest river, it has been developed under a veil of secrecy.
• Autocratic: The dam will impact Ethiopians and downstream neighbours, yet its planning process has been top-down and unilateral. The public and dam-affected people have not been given a meaningful opportunity to critique the project or process.
• Dismissive: Ethiopian government officials have flatly stated they will not make changes to the project, and have asserted that the project will not have impacts on downstream countries.
Due to all these conflicts an international committee – called the Trio Committee – was formed based on the proposal of the Ex. Ethiopian Prime Minister M. Zenawei about two years ago to reduce the tension. The committee concluded its work that took around a year and half and issued its report on the review of the studies presented by the Ethiopian Government. The trio committee consisted of 10 members; 2 from each of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, and four international experts approved by the three countries. The committee has recently concluded its review and issued its report with the following conclusions:
1) There are no sufficient structural studies. 2) There is a lack in the hydrological investigations. 3) There are no environmental impact assessments on the two downstream countries; Egypt and Sudan.
In addition, the Ethiopian Government failed to submit advanced studies reflecting the details and reliability analysis to meet the minimum requirements of the international standards for similar size of dams. Such lack in information and the weakness of the studies formed an obstacle in enabling the Trio Committee to assess the structural safety of the dam and the negative impacts on both Egypt and Sudan.
Haydar Yousif a hydrologist from Sudan stated that due to the Grand Renaissance Dam site is in the Great African Rift Valley near the Afar Depression, an area in which tectonic turmoil is so great it could cause earthquakes. The dam could be at risk from damage by earthquakes, yet no one knows if it has even been analysed for this risk, or the largest earthquake it is being designed to withstand. The failure of such a huge structure puts more than 100 million people living downstream at risk.
Although the risk of that happening from the Afar depression turmoil will not be as realistic as it can easily happen from the activation of the Blue Nile Rift which is part of the Sudanese Rift System (Salama, 1997, 2005). The Blue Nile course is along the fault systems of the Blue Nile Rift. The weight of the water and the silt which will accumulate behind the dam will induce enough seismicity to activate the fault lines in the Blue Nile Rift. A dam with a reservoir as large as this is not just vulnerable to seismic events – it will cause them. There is enough evidence from many countries of large reservoirs inducing earthquakes. The most serious to date was China’s devastating magnitude 7.9 earthquake in 2008, which some experts believe was induced by Zipingpu Dam.
There is no doubt that the dam will induce seismic events which can generate enough force to cause earthquakes which will activate the fault system of the Blue Nile Rift and cause the failure of this dinosaur structure and in this case we will know what is the cause of the extinction of life in Northern Sudan and Egypt.