
THE KATSE DAM
THE SOURCE OF OUR TROUT
As a commercial-scale rainbow trout farm, Sanlei is located on the edge of the Katse Dam in the remote highlands of Lesotho; a site known for its deep, pristine waters and highly favourable environment for growing premium trout. The company owns its own FSSC 22000 certified processing plant and provides much needed employment to over 80 permanent staff from five local communities.
It is only when you stand next to the Katse Dam wall and discover how small you are in comparison, that you realise how fascinating the Katse Dam really is. Here follows 12 fascinating facts about the Katse Dam:
- The wall is 185 metres high, 60 metres wide at the base, 9 metres wide at top and curves from side to side as well as from top to bottom, making it one of only 30 double-curved concrete arch dam walls in the world.
- During the initial excavation, it was discovered that the bedrock was seismically unstable. As a result, civil engineers had to incorporate a moveable joint in the dam’s base to allow it to flex.
- It took six years and 2.32 million cubic metres of concrete to build. A truckload of cement and fly ash, transported by road from Ficksburg, was delivered every 40 minutes during the construction phase.
- Katse, the highest dam in Africa, is also one of the world’s ten largest concrete arch dams in terms of volume, with a capacity of nearly 2 billion cubic metres and a surface area of 38.5 square kilometres.
- There is a series of parallel galleries inside the dam wall that use precision laser instruments to check on the wall’s movement and the dam’s behaviour. The galleries also act as drainage tunnels for water seepage from the mountain.
- Katse dam is the transfer reservoir for the whole Lesotho Highlands Water Project. All the water captured by the different structures (like Mohale Dam, which is connected to Katse by a 32km-long tunnel) flow from it to South Africa via Clarens in the Free State.
- The Katse dam provides 72 megawatts of electricity for Lesotho.
- Lesotho earns some R25 million in export revenue every month for supplying South Africa with water.
- As a result of the project, Lesotho received 100 kilometres of new tar road and 260 kilometres of new gravel road, while 1000 kilometres of existing gravel road was upgraded. The project also created jobs, especially near Butha-Buthe and the Ash River Outfall near Clarens in the Free State, which is the final stage of the tunnels that take water to Gauteng.
- The flip-side is that once-remote mountain villages were changed dramatically. Some 20 000 people lost their homes, farmland or communal grazing grounds (although similar-sized new homes were provided elsewhere). But the effects are still being felt today, with some communities that used to share social ties now cut off from each other by the reservoir.
- Phase 2 was set to begin near Mokhotlong in 2014 and expected to take five to six years before it finally joined with Katse dam via a tunnel.
- Fish in the dam include trout and indigenous yellow fish. Trout are farmed for local consumption and export.
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