Word: dammed
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...regimes have conflicting visions of Arab unity, compounded by some practical problems. Currently, Iraq's relations with Syria are at the breaking point over disposition of water from the Euphrates River. Baghdad charges that Damascus has deliberately stored up so much water behind its new Tabqa Dam that Iraqi crops have been ruined and that 3 million Iraqis who depend on the river are short of drinking water. Saudi Petroleum Minister Sheik Zaki Yamani, whose negotiating skills have been honed at endless meetings of Middle East oil moguls, has been mediating between them. The split is so deep that...
...families-all members of Joseph's Church of Jesus Christ of Solemn Assembly-to establish a settlement on a 2,000-acre tract of federal land in southern Utah. Before the Bureau of Land Management began proceedings to evict them, they had put up ten buildings, started a dam and planted vegetables. A federal court is now deciding whether they are homesteaders or simply squatters...
Critics of the dam point out that it has obstructed the natural flow of silt that enriched the soil of farms along the Nile. Thus it has been necessary to increase the use of imported chemical fertilizers on farms downstream from the dam. Environmentalists also contend that elimination of the silt flow has increased the rate of erosion along the Mediterranean coast adjoining the Nile Delta. In addition, they claim that the absence of the organic matter in the silt in the waters at the river's mouth has deprived sardines and shrimp of an adequate food supply...
...flood control provided by the dam has posed other problems. Residents along the Nile's banks now endure increasing rodent populations that were previously curbed by the cyclical floods. In towns bordering the river, sewage systems that once were regularly flushed out by the flooding and subsequent receding of the river have become badly clogged. The most serious criticism of flood control is that the drainage of more than 1.2 million acres of the nation's rich farm land below the dam is now insufficient Much of that land has become increasingly saline, reducing agricultural productivity...
...that inadequate drainage of farm land is a problem, but they say it is a problem they foresaw. Plans to build drainage canals, they say, were sidetracked by the 1967 war with Israel and are only now being revived. More important to agricultural experts is the fact that the dam helped stave off droughts in the exceedingly dry years of 1972 and 1973. "We are forever saved," says William K. Shenouda, Under Secretary of State responsible for the dam, "from the cycle of seven lean years and seven fat years that Joseph encountered in biblical times." A team from...