Zambia, Zimbabwe set date for building hydro dam

Zambia and Zimbabwe will start building a $4 billion (3.54-billion-euro) hydropower dam across the Zambezi River next year, a statement said Tuesday, signalling progress in a project first mooted 25 years ago.

The Batoka Gorge dam will be situated 50 kilometres (30 miles) downstream of the Victoria Falls with a designed capacity of 2,400 megawatts shared between the two countries.

The Zambezi River Authority (ZRA), which is jointly run by Zambia and Zimbabwe, said feasibility studies were almost complete and a developer would be signed up by the end of this year.

"The developer is expected to commence works in the last quarter of 2020," Munyaradzi Munodawafa, chief executive of the ZRA, said in the statement.

The ZRA said the project would have "minimal impacts" on local people as the reservoir behind the dam wall would be contained within the gorge.

Studies are underway to mitigate environmental damage, it said.

Zambia has said the project will be built on a "build-operate-transfer" funding model that would not put fiscal strain on the two impoverished countries.

The country's energy minister, Matthew Nkhuwa, told AFP this week that a bidder had yet to be chosen to build for the project.

According to Bloomberg News, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said last month that General Electric of the US and Power Construction Corporation of China had been selected.

As well as the dam, roads, transmission infrastructure and housing would also be built.

Zimbabwe suffers regular power cuts of 19 hours a day, while Zambia has shorter outages.

The two countries already run the massive Kariba hydropower dam further upstream on the Zambezi river, although it is operating below capacity due to a drought.

Six dead, 18 missing after Indian dam breached
Mumbai (AFP) July 3, 2019 - Six people were killed and at least 18 were missing on Wednesday after the heaviest monsoon rains in a decade breached a dam in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, authorities said.

"Using drones, we have located six dead bodies and over 18 people are still missing," Alok Awasthy, spokesman for India's National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), told AFP.

"We have deployed two teams after the Tiware dam breach occurred last night and are looking for survivors," Awasthy added.

Besides NDRF, police teams and government officials were also looking for survivors in Ratnagiri, 275 kilometres (170 miles) from Mumbai.

On Tuesday, a wall collapsed in a Mumbai slum because of the rains, killing at least 22 people and injuring scores as the deluge crippled India's sprawling financial capital.

Six labourers also died in the nearby city of Pune when another wall subsided.

On Wednesday rains continued to lash the coastal city of 20 million people, bringing it to a virtual standstill as flooding cut train lines, closed the airport's main runway and caused traffic misery.

Building collapses and dam breaches are common during the monsoon in India due to dilapidated structures that buckle under the weight of continuous rain.

India's weather department has warned of "extremely heavy rainfall" in parts of Mumbai in the coming days.

According to Skymet Weather, a private-weather tracking agency, Mumbai faces serious risks of flooding with more than 200 millimetres (eight inches) of rain expected in the next few days.

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