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High Dam


It was built during the reign of Egyptian president Gamal Abd-Elnasser on the Nile River. The main purpose of its construction is to storage the excess water resulting from floods, the dam also the main source of electricity for Egypt. The dam is 3600 meters long, the base width is 980 meters, and the upper width is 40 Meters and it has a height of 111 meters. The total materials used in construction of 43 million cubic of cement, iron and other construction materials, cost of construction was almost 1 billion dollar, 400 experts from the soviet union participated to the construction of high dam, the official opening of the dam was in 1971. The high dam is located in the city of Aswan in southern Egypt; Aswan is the last Egyptian city on the border with Sudan, since the pharaohs; Egyptians have realized the importance of Nile water. They have built dams and reservoirs to store water at the time of floods and use them in times of shortage of floods for level of flood waters varies from year to year. After the revolution of July 1952, the Egyptian-Greek engineer Adrian Daninus submitted to the revolution command council a project to build a dam to reserve the flood waters and generate electricity. The former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser ordered a group of experts consisting of a group of Egyptian army engineers and a group of university professors to choose a suitable place to build the dam and supervise its construction. This place was chosen to the narrow of the Nile stream in that spot and the relative rise from the ground level which leads to a good result in generating electricity by running water and falling from top to bottom, after Gamal Abdel-Nasser agreed with the international bank for construction and housing to finance the dam, the bank withdrew its funding for the dam after pressure of many countries. President Gamal Abdel-Nasser was forced to seek alternative quick solutions. He nationalized the Suez Canal international company and made it an Egyptian joint stock company.