News letter Dam edition

Ingeokring Newsletter
Editorial
Michiel Maurenbrecher, guest editor
“Holland....lies so low its people are only saved by being damned!”
Up the Rhine , Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
This must be the first issue of the Ingeokring Newsletter that deals with dams. Well, almost: I wrote an article on a presentation
given by Charles Dufour on invitation of the Mijnbouwkundige Vereeniging on irrigation schemes in Yemen mentioning the
old and new Marib Dams (Water resources assessment in the Republic of Yemen, F.C. Dufour (reporter P.M. Maurenbrecher),
Ingeokring Nieuwsbrief, lente-zomer editie, 1991, pp. 41-43). For this Newsletter issue, Charles has written a more specific paper
on the old and new dams. Perusing further through my complete collection of Newsletters dating from 1977, there seem
to be two more articles on dams. One is about the Ribarroja Dam, written by ITC student Carlos Caranza Torres (Ribarroja Dam
excursion, C.M. Caranza Torres, Ingeokring Nieuwsbrief, herfst editie, 1993, pp. 19-22). The problems associated with this dam,
situated close to the ITC and TU Delft engineering geology students’ common fieldwork area in Spain, can also be read in Peter
Verhoef’s dam experience and case history in the Afar District, Ethiopia which makes riveting reading: damnation lurks for
those dam engineers lacking knowledge of geological materials. The other article is about the Canelles Dam and can be found
in the summer 2001 issue of this Newsletter (Excursion to the Canalles Dam, R.M. Schmitz & S. Gyaltsen, Ingeokring Newsletter
No. 9, summer 2001, pp. 13-16).
Because there are insufficient steep valleys to flood in the Netherlands, it seemed for a time that engineers and engineering
geologists are not much involved with dams except the type Thomas Hood refers to. The theme ‘dams’ came up when Dr.
Mario Alvarez Grima sent a paper on piping in dams to the Ingeokring Newsletter. That was the one theme not mentioned by
the editors in their ‘invitation’ to me at my TU Delft farewell symposium of June 2006 to be guest editor of one of the Newsletter
issues. Increasingly, dams seem to be damned, especially by environmentalists. Our new Ingeokring Newsletter editor Erik
Schoute, whilst working for Boskalis in the USA, went on two road trips in the Western USA and writes about the dams he visited.
Two dams, Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, were also visited on the DIG Colorado study tour with Prof. Keith Turner in
2000. I remember the engineer from the USBR complaining about the increasingly stronger lobby from the Sierra Club wanting
to demolish these dams so as to give the Colorado river its old confluence back. Dams are damned structures but possibly the
necessary evil to save humanity from thirst, hunger, decease and wasteful use of fossil fuels. The Sierra Club is not alone: look
at the advertisement by the WWF depicting the Hoover Dam as ‘Hoover Damned’ gravestone in their recent advertisements.
Despite this negative publicity, dams are ‘Megastructures’ as Discovery Channel viewers know by now. There are surprisingly
plenty of Dutch engineers and engineering geologists who have been and are involved with dams, of which one is featured on
Discovery Channel: ‘The Enclosure Dam’ in the Netherlands, still the longest in the world. Another equally grand dam crosses
the Suriname River: the Afobaka Dam, a 54 m high and 2 km long rock fill dam with a concrete gravity spillway-sluice gate and
power station complex. The dam was designed by W.J. van Blommestein, after which the huge reservoir behind the dam is
named (size of Province of Utrecht). Trying to obtain technical information on its design through the TU Delft library yielded
nothing, while Google searches painted a picture of the Afobaka dam as another ‘Thomas Hood damned’ dam: the reservoir
being choked with water hyacinth, piranha fish and the power generated by the dam solely provided for the benefit of the
aluminium industry (the main money earner) of Suriname.
This Newsletter has become fairly sizeable, its size could have been bigger as I discovered more and more Dutch engineers
involved in this industry. There has been a visit of the new student chapter of Geo-Engineering to Madrid. During this visit,
Gerard Arends (Ondergronds Bouwen) owned up he had been involved in a dam project during his internship. Very recently
the section head of Geo-Engineering, Frits van Tol, also mentioned he did his student internship on a concrete arch dam (170
m) north of Madrid. Enquiring about Van Blommestein through Emeritus Prof. Arnold Verruijt led me to another emeritus professor,
Jan Kop. He has actually worked under Van Blommestein in Bangladesh and had also visited the Afobaka Dam in Suriname
(assuring me that one can see the design features on posters/drawings hanging on the wall, presumably at the power
station).
Dam edition | Double Issue 2007/2008 | 4