The Sennar Dam is an

irrigation Irrigation (also referred to as watering of plants) is the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow crops, landscape plants, and lawns. Irrigation has been a key aspect of agriculture for over 5,000 years and has bee ...

dam on the

Blue Nile The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. It travels for approximately through Ethiopia and Sudan. Along with the White Nile, it is one of the two major Tributary, tributaries of the Nile and supplies about 85.6% of the wa ...

near the town of

Sennar Sennar ( ') is a city on the Blue Nile in Sudan and possibly the capital of the state of Sennar. For several centuries it was the capital of the Funj Kingdom of Sennar and until at least 2011, Sennar was the capital of Sennar State. Histo ...

in the Al Jazirah region of

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

. The dam is long and has a maximum height of . It was designed by the Scottish engineer Sir Murdoch MacDonald, begun in 1914 and completed in 1925 by the British contractor S Pearson & Sons.

Construction

Work on the dam started in 1914, but was almost immediately interrupted by the outbreak of

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. Work recommenced in 1919, the contractors being the Sudan Construction Company, who carried on the work until 1921 when work was stopped for a second time as it became clear that the estimated cost of the scheme would be considerably exceeded. In 1922, with further funds obtained, six British firms were invited to tender to complete the dam and build the connecting canal system. S Pearson and Sons was successful, and contracted to complete the dam by July 1925. Oswald Longstaff Prowde was resident engineer and John Watson Gibson was site agent. Work began in December 1922 and the dam was finished in May 1925. The Sennar dam is one of the highlights of the state of

as it was the first dam built in the country. The lake capacity is about 390 million cubic meters of water, mainly used in irrigating agricultural projects such as Blue Nile Agricultural Foundation, Al Sookie agriculture project, Al Managel agriculture project, Aljazeera agriculture project, west of Sennar sugar project, and the Al-Rahad agriculture project. Additionally, the dam enables storage for hydraulic power generation, which is estimated to have a production of about 14 MW covering more than 80% of Sennar state's consumption and covers the slight deficit of the national grid.

References

External links

* Gezira State Blue Nile Dams completed in 1925 Dams in Sudan Dams in the Nile basin Sennar State {{Africa-dam-stub