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Mozambique: Floods Would Have Been Worse Without Cahora Bassa
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
28 February 2008
Posted to the web 28 February 2008
Maputo
The impact of this year's floods in the Zambezi Valley would have been much worse, if the Cahora Bassa dam did not exist, according to Henriques Silva, an environmental and engineering specialist with the dam operating company, Hidroelectrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB).
One current of thought in Mozambique has argued that the discharges from the Cahora Bassa floodgates make the flooding on the middle and lower Zambezi worse. In extreme form, as expressed by the former rebel movement Renamo, this becomes a conspiracy theory whereby the government orders HCB to release enormous amounts of water in order to force people from their homes so that they can be concentrated in what Renamo calls "communal villages" where they can be more easily controlled.
Silva, interviewed in the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique", argued that this was the opposite of the truth. "Without the dam, the floods would have been worse, since all the water would have come down. The Zambeze Hotel (in Tete city) would have been reached by the floods".
The hotel Silva mentioned is a well-known landmark in Tete, standing well above the level of the river, and about 200 metres from its banks. In none of the three major floods this decade (2001, 2007 and this year) has the water reached the hotel, although the river has invaded lower lying Tete suburbs and drowned crops planted in the Nhartanda Valley.
Silva pointed out that during this rainy season Cahora Bassa has often been releasing through its floodgates only half the amount of water flowing into the dam lake from Zambia and Zimbabwe. "We were receiving 10,000 cubic metres a second, but we only released 5,000 cubic metres a second, and then cut that to 3,900 cubic metres a second", he said.
The cause of the floods had nothing to do with Cahora Bassa, he said, but was the torrential rainfall in central Mozambique and in the neighbouring countries (Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi), which all drained into the Zambezi valley. The rainfall this year was heavier than in 1978 - the year of the worst Zambezi flooding since Mozambican independence in 1975.
HCB's contribution was decisive in the opposite direction - in holding the water back, in allowing the level of the dam lake to rise, and restricting discharges from the floodgates.
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This was a matter of careful dam management, argued Silva, ensuring that the lake was able to store water from upstream, while at the same guaranteeing the physical integrity of the dam wall.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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