Forget swine flu! We are facing much bigger problems

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

05 July 2009

I cannot understand why everyone is running scared of a disease that (a) is treatable and (b) has a survival rate of over 80 percent amongst those who do not get any treatment. Furthermore, only 70,000 infections have been recorded worldwide (yes, the whole planet!) and out of these only 300 have died – less than half a percent! Besides; at the time of writing this article, Kenya had only one confirmed patient (who is not even Kenyan!) and one suspected case still under investigation.

The real tragedy is that, while we keep all our medical personnel (from the Minister for Health all the way down to cleaners in clinics) busy attending to this harmless disease, 30,000 children continue to die every day from malaria – a predictable, preventable and treatable ailment!

I refuse to be sucked into the subject of swine flu and prefer to discuss a more pressing problem facing our country: the impending shortage of electricity. This week, the Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) shut down the generators at the Masinga Dam because the water level had gone below the minimum required to drive the turbines.

Contrary to what many newsrooms reported, Masinga is not the largest power station in the Seven Forks complex; it is actually the smallest! However, this dam is the biggest water reservoir in the whole country.

Now that sounds contradictory. How can the dam with the largest water storage be the one producing the smallest amount of power? The reason is that the power generating capacity does not depend on the amount of water stored. Think about it, Ndakaini dam on the Thika River (which, incidentally, is one of the main inlets to Masinga) generates zero mega watts, yet it has more water than some of the Seven Forks reservoirs. Of course, the reason is that they did not install a generator at Ndakaini!

Masinga dam has two generators each with a capacity of 20 mega watts (MW). This makes a total of 40MW, which is miniscule when compared to the over 500MW combined out put of the other Seven Forks dams. Masinga contributes less than 0.4 percent of Kenya’s total electricity production! Thus it is no big deal that this power station stopped generating this week.

However, because of its huge water storage capacity, Masinga dam (not the power station!) is the most strategically important reservoir in the Seven Forks complex. When completely full, it holds about 1.56 billion cubic metres of water. Since one cubic metre is equivalent to 1,000 litres, this works to 1.56 trillion litres. Now that’s a lot of water.

 The out-flow rate from Masinga over 300 million litres per hour. Thus if the rivers feeding the dam dried up completely, the reservoir could maintain the Tana (and therefore, the four power stations downstream) running normally for about 4,700 hours. That is close to 200 days –  over six months!

This brings out the great advantage of building a series of power stations along one river, rather than putting them on different water systems. Those who criticise the Seven Forks complex don’t know the full story!