More than one billion cubic meters of water stored in GERD: water expert

Satellites showed that seven days after the start of the third storage in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), more than one billion cubic meters of water were stored in the dam, Egyptian water expert Abbas Sharaky said in an interview on 18 July. Sharaky said that the two drainage gates will continue to open (60 million m3 / day), adding that this is evident from comparing the level of water in the lake today with the highest level of water in the lake in September. He stated that last week’s total size of water was about 1.5 billion m3, half a billion m3 was drained through the two drainage gates and the remaining billion was stored. The third storage is expected to be about five billion m3 in addition to the storage of the past two years, bringing the total to about 13 billion m3. Egyptian Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Mohamed Abdel-Aty said in October that an international committee was formed to study the dam in 2011 and ended in 2013, which he said confirmed that there are major technical problems in the dam’s construction which could lead to instability.