Lake Victoria Has Lost At Least Six Vertical Feet In Past Four Years - SF Chronicle

[hatrack]

06-24) 04:00 PDT Kisumu, Kenya -- As the morning sky lightens, the sound of machetes hacking through thick grass echoes along the lake's coastline. Fishermen, stripped to their underwear in the already stifling heat, are looking for silvery baby fish along the shoreline in defiance of laws against taking them in breeding grounds.

Lake Victoria, the world's largest tropical lake at 26,560 square miles and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world, is losing water at an alarming rate - at least six feet in the past four years. As a result, the waterway may soon join the list of dying lakes, some ecologists say. The reasons are varied: rising temperatures, invasive species, hydroelectric dams, and about 30 million fishermen and dirt farmers from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda who eke out a living from the lake and use it as their primary source of water.

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The once-abundant iridescent tilapia and Nile perch are slowly disappearing from the Kenyan side. The Nile perch, introduced in the 1950s to increase fish yields, became a predator of several indigenous species such as the striped haplochromis. And on top of all this, the climate is changing.

"Sometimes we just fish naked because it's so hot," Obiero said after catching a single catfish one morning. "When I was growing up it wasn't like this - there was plenty of rain." However, a 2006 study by Berkeley's International Rivers places much of the blame for the lake's woes on dam projects by Uganda. The Kiira Dam, built in 1999 alongside the 1954 Owen Falls Dam, uses Lake Victoria's waters to generate power for Ugandan residents and export energy to neighboring nations. Both dams operate at the source of the Nile River, where it flows out of Lake Victoria.

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/24/MN1F112I0F.DTL

[NNadir]

1. Shades of the Aral Sea.

[kestrel91316]

2. When it goes dry we won't have to expend any time or energy worrying about

it anymore. Gotta look on the bright side.

[hogwyld]

3. Not exactly sure, but will this affect the falls?

What's going to happen to the surrounding African nations and people? All of these global happenings are starting to add up, and it's getting really scary out there.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Fucking speculators will pinch anything

Why do they want all that water, anyway? :shrug:

[XemaSab]

5. Um, to sell it for a dollar a gallon to the same people who used to get it for free?

:shrug: