Engineers’ Dreams - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 158

evaporation, to a mere 6,000 square miles from the 170,000 it covered 10,000 years ago. This dearth
of water occurs only a few hundred miles north of rain forests where water abounds. Through the
rain forest also passes the Congo River, which is believed to have originated when the water from
a vast inland lake—at the location of the present Congo Basin—flowed through the mountains to
the sea. Now the Congo passes along chasms that were eroded through the mountains, and building
a dam in one of these would back the water of the river and its tributaries up into the basin to re-
form a Congo lake, the 350,000 square miles of which would nearly equal the combined area of all
of California, Nevada, and Oregon. Some overflow from the lake could be fed northward into the
Chari River, which is the main source of water for Lake Chad, thus restoring conditions that fed the
Chad Sea ten thousand years ago. In time, the restored Chad Sea would also begin to overflow, and
the excess water could be directed into a newly navigable river to flow ultimately into the Mediter-
ranean Sea.
Today, of course, there would be considerable discussion of the environmental impact of such
an enormous and far-reaching project, but at the time Ley was writing, there was not yet a general
sensitivity to such issues. He describes some of the benefits of the project, such as the availability
of huge amounts of hydroelectric power and new means of water transportation. He acknowledges
that such massive flooding could destroy some places of scenic beauty, but he generally believes
that “everything of known value” would be outside the area to be inundated. Ley does recognize
that, even though some of the land to be flooded is a breeding ground for tropical diseases, there
would be a large number of people living there who would have to be relocated. He rationalizes,
however, that since their living conditions would be improved “it is unlikely that they would ob-
ject.” He does concede, on the other hand, that changing African political boundaries could make
the project unrealizable. Nevertheless, on balance, Ley's recounting of a cost-benefit analysis be-
trays the insensitivity of his times to issues that today evoke virtual knee-jerk reactions, even when
the projects proposed are minuscule and innocuous in comparison to damming the Congo River.
The Congo plan was in fact the brainchild of Herman Sorgel, an architect by training who came
to be employed by the Bavarian government. Sorgel, who was born in 1885, had written on ar-
chitecture and aesthetics, including topics on Frank Lloyd Wright and the weekend house, before
turning his attention to things on a larger scale, which related to his growing interest in geopolitics.
He envisioned three world supercontinents, one of which would be formed by uniting Europe and
Africa, with the latter providing resources and living space for the growth of the former. His con-
cern for the peoples of Africa seems to have been virtually nonexistent.
If Europe and Africa were to be united, there would have to be land bridges and vast sources of
power, and thus, in the late 1920s, Sorgel outlined his plan for reclaiming land from the Mediter-
ranean Sea. At first he called it the Panropa Plan, but since there was a similarly named political
group promoting European confederation, Sorgel renamed his scheme the Atlantropa Plan. He first
published his idea early in 1928, followed the next year by a more comprehensive plan entitled “Re-
duction of the Mediterranean.”
There are four main sources of water that replenish what the Mediterranean loses to evaporation:
rainfall, the Black Sea, rivers, and the Atlantic Ocean. The flow through the Strait of Gibraltar ac-
counts for two thirds of the total inflow, and so erecting a dam across the strait would cause the level