Shalatin dam to protect Egypt from flooding danger: Ministry

CAIRO – 11 December 2017: Egypt’s newly announced dam, which will be constructed in the southern basin valleys of Shalatin, aims to protect the country from the dangers of flooding and to utilize its water amid the water scarcity facing Egypt, said Houssam Al-Imam, spokesperson of Water Resources and Irrigation, in a statement on Monday.

The capacity of the 12-meter-heigh dam will store seven billion cubic meters of water. It will soon begin to collect rainwater, as studies regarding its viability have recently finished.

The studies were conducted jointly by the groundwater sector at the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources and the Water Resources Research Institute.

On Saturday, the sector’s head, Sameh Sakr, announced that the dam would be the largest in the Eastern Desert and that the project will be executed by the National Company for General Contraction affiliated with the National Service Authority, in accordance with protocols signed between the ministry and the company to execute projects in the Red Sea governorate.

Sakr added that the dam would help development in the surrounding area and that all dams built by the ministry do not affect the ecosystem or block the roads leading up the valleys.

Egypt’s 94-million person population depends on Nile water, but it now faces a water shortage, as was announced by Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohamed Abdel-Ati in 2015. Egypt’s average water resources per capita have dropped to 663 cubic meters per year and are expected to plummet to 582 cubic meters by 2025, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in 2014. Meanwhile, the international benchmark is 1,000 cubic meters annually per capita.