Water levels on Kariba dam rise

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 13:24:34 +0000

By BENNIE MUNDANDO

WATER levels on Lake Kariba have continued surging with the latest update from the Zambezi River Authority indicating an increase of 3 percent from the initial 33 percent to 36 percent as at last week.

The water level also showed a significant difference to what was obtaining last year during the same period under review when the lake only had a paltry 14 percent of water volume.

“The water level rose by 0.38m during the week under review due to rainfall activities around the lake and closed the week at 480.58m on 10th March 2017.  Last year on the same date, the Lake level was 477.48m.

“All spillway gates at Kariba remained closed during the week under review. The Kariba Lake was created and designed to operate between levels 475.50m and 488.50m with 0.70m freeboard at all times,” reads the latest update from the Zambezi River Authority.

Zambia was hit by a prolonged drought last year due to the El Nino weather pattern which affected water harvest and led to deficiencies in electricity generation as the country depends much on hydro-electric power generation as the Kariba dam water levels hit its lowest

In June 2015, ZESCO released a statement saying that erratic rainfall over the last two years had resulted in low water supplies at both its Kariba North Power station and Kafue Gorge Station.

Kariba was running at only 40 percent capacity while Kafue Gorge was running at one-third of its 1,500 megawatt (MW) generation capacity.

The country’s copper mining industry, which accounts for 70 percent of Zambia’s foreign exchange earnings, hobbled by the country’s power problem leading to Anglo-Swiss mining and commodity trading giant Glencore, laying off some workers.

The Kariba Dam supplies 1,626 megawatts of electricity to parts of both Zambia and Zimbabwe and generates 6,400 gigawatt-hours per annum and each country has its own power station on the north and south bank of the dam respectively.

The north station belonging to Zambia has been in operation since 1976, and has four generators of 150 megawatts each for a total of 600 megawatts and works to expand this capacity by an additional 360 megawatts was completed in December 2013.

The Kariba Dam project was planned by the government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, or Central African Federation (CAF). The CAF was a semi-independent state within the Commonwealth in southern Africa that existed from 1953 to the end of 1963, comprising the former self-governing British colonies of Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia and the former British protectorate of Nyasaland.

Since Zambia’s independence, two dams have been built on the Kafue River: the Kafue Gorge Dam and the Itezhi-Tezhi Dam.