Egypt: The Aswan High Dam (Aswan)

Sorry, I don't have a good picture of the Aswan High Dam, so here's a picture of Wade and Patrick sitting in front of Lake Nasser, which is basically all the water that the dam stops and stores. Basically the Egyptians needed electrical power and some way to save water from the constant droughts that they were having. So they built this huge dam to stop the water on the Nile, and then slowly release the water over time.

With a building project this size, there are good points and bad points. The good was that it stopped the unpredictable summer floods of the Nile - sometimes the floods were too much and wiped out all the crops - other times it was too little, and there was a drought. The dam also generates about 2.1 gigawatts of elecricity (I think that's probably a lot).

The bad is that the reseroir of Lake Nasser, which is 480 km long and 16 km at its widest with a surface area of 6,000 km² and holds 150 to 165 km³, ended up covering major archaelogical sites and made thousands of people, called the Nubians, to lose their homes. There is also the risk that if the dam were to ever be broken and the water rush out - it would basically flood all of Egypt (as well as Cyprus, which is a small island out in the Mediterranean). Perhaps the most immediate problem is that the nutrients that the flooding Nile brought each year have ben stopped behind in Lake Nasser, so food crops do not grow as well.