The Sennar Dam is an

irrigation Irrigation (also referred to as watering) is the practice of applying controlled amounts of water to land to help grow Crop, crops, Landscape plant, landscape plants, and Lawn, lawns. Irrigation has been a key aspect of agriculture for over 5,00 ...

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 tributaries of the Nile and supplies about 85.6% of the water ...

near the town of

Sennar Sennar ( ar, سنار ') is a city on the Blue Nile in Sudan and possibly the capital of the state of Sennar. It remains publicly unclear whether Sennar or Singa is the capital of Sennar State. For several centuries it was the capital of the F ...

in the Al Jazirah region of

Sudan Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...

. 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 (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. 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 a resident engineer and

John Watson Gibson Sir John Watson Gibson (9 August 1885 – 19 March 1947) was an English civil engineer. He designed dams in England and in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and port installations in England and Ireland. In the UK he is most notable for having designed a k ...

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 Sennar as the first dam built in the country with a lake capacity of about 390 million cubic meters of water 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, in addition to the use of storage in 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

* Al Jazirah (state) Blue Nile Dams completed in 1925 Dams in Sudan Dams in the Nile basin Sennar (state) {{Africa-dam-stub