Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1902 — GREAT DAM IS DEDICATED. [ARTICLE]

GREAT DAM IS DEDICATED.

Zatxaense Reservoir of the Nile Opened —Marks Great Achievement. The great Assouan dam—boon for Egypt and one of the most wonderful achievements of man—was dedicated Wednesday. The Duke of Connaught laid the last stone of the immense reservoir in the presence of a party of Englishmen and Egyptians. The Assouan dam and the Assiout barrage are monuments to British engineering skill and progressive -policy. These great works, which have cost between $100,000,900 H nd $125,000,000, will systematize irrigation, impart security to crops and stability to harvests, and widen the area of Nile lands under cultivation. The Assouan dam is one and onefourth miles long and will hold the water 347.0 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The dam is pierced by 180 openings, each twenty-three feet high and seven feet wide, Each sluice is fitted with steel gates, adjustable at will, so as to enable the water to go in and out. An idea of the immensity of the labor involved in the construction may be obtained from the fact that the foundations of some of the sluices go seventy-five feet below the ordinary rock surface. The annual flood, with its fertilized silt and soil, already has passed, and the sluices of the Assouan dam are now closed for the storage of water until the Ist of Mari'h. The sluices will then be opened gradually, and for four months there will be a good head of water in ihe Treery irrigating canal for the use of cultivators. The scarcity of. water caused by the low Nile will be avoided, and a great increase in the agricultural resources of the English will he brought about. The Nile will he held up by a dam 100 feet thick at the base and the valley above it will he flooded for fifty miles. The experts are making a striking comparison. They calculate that the reservoir will hold water enough for a year's full supply for every town and village in the United Kingdom. The engineering works also include an open weir or barrage at Assiout, a long way down the Nile, by which the distribution of the water from the great .reservoir is secured over a largo area.