Low water levels aid plans for rehabilitation of Kariba Dam
The drought is a boon for rescue teams replacing seized floodgates’ gates and apertures and also for reshaping the plunge pool on the Zambezi River bed, writes Tom Nevin
In the months ahead, the Kariba Dam hydroelectric scheme must deal with the twin challenges of not holding enough water on the one hand and too much of it on the other. The capricious moods of the weather in the Zambezi River catchment leave everyone guessing. The flood plain is a huge swathe of mainly bush land carved by tributaries that deposit water into Africa’s fourth-biggest river for its journey to the monstrous Lake Kariba, some 181-billion tonnes of water in extent. So far, the rainy season has been reasonable, but worryingly patchy. There’s an upside, however. Kariba was built on a gorge on the Zambezi River. The dam wall forced the rising waters to spill out of the gorge and back up over the land upstream creating a 250km long lake. "Most of the storage is in the lake’s upper levels and, even when most of the storage is depleted, the water levels are still quite a lot higher than the turbines," notes New Zealander Bryan Leyland, a global expert on hydroelectric schemes. "...
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