|
 If you're going to
do hydropower, do it big. None of this weedy Hoover Dam or Three
Gorges nonsense. You don't want to muck about with rivers.
You want to dam up seas.
At least that was the reasoning of the German architect/engineer
Herman Sörgel (1885-1952), who from 1927 on wanted to turn the entire
Mediterranean into one huge hydroelectric power plant. Dead
simple, he'd say (in German, of course). Just put a dam across
the straits of Gibraltar, let the sea level in the Mediterranean drop
330 feet, and then sling another couple of dams between Tunis, Sicily,
and the Italian mainland for another drop to 660 feet.
Add some smaller dams on the Bosporus and The Nile, kick in an
artificial lake to keep the tourists happy in Venice and you've got
the makings of a whole new world.
Sörgel saw his überprojekt as the greatest
engineering feat in the history of man. That you have to give
him. With his system of dams the Mediterranean would have become
a huge source of power as turbines caught the flow from the Atlantic,
between the two halves of the Med, the Black Sea, and the Nile.
The damming of Africa's great rivers would flood the Sahara; making it
fertile. And the bed of the Mediterranean would be exposed to
the Sun for the first time since the last Ice Age to provide thousands
of square miles of living space.
Of course, there is the little problem of massive
flooding in the Crimea, Asia Minor, and the Bulgaria; and the tiny
side effect of raising sea levels around the world and the alteration
of ocean currents to the point of triggering massive climactic
changes, but that is as nothing compared to the frightening spectacle
of the inevitable waves of irate and now landlocked Riviera hotel
owners as they saw their business literally go south. |
