A school trip

A School Trip.

It rains a lot in the mountains of Lesotho(just like being back home in Wales). When it does rains, it falls in short heavy bursts, as if someone has emptied a large bucket. It is almost always accompanied by very loud claps of thunder and bright flashes of lightening.

As in Wales the water is collected in very large reservoirs. The water in the reservoirs has 2 uses, 1, for people to use and 2, to generate electricity. Lesotho does not use much of the water for its people to use for drinking, washing and cooking, so it sells what it does not need to South Africa. South Africa is a lot drier so it needs the water that Lesotho can provide. What Lesotho uses the water for is to generate electricity through its Hydro electric power station.

With the reservoirs and hydro electric powers station being up in the mountains we had a very long journey to get there. So long in fact that we had to stay away from home over night. But unlike places such as Ty Gwyn or Staylittle or even visits up to London where you all sleep in comfortable beds,  the children and teachers had to sleep on the floor in one of the village schools. So we all had to take blankets or sleeping bags.

The Muela hydro electric power station is over 700 metres  underground. You can see from the picture the entrance to the tunnel. It is wide enough to have 2 cars drive side by side and high enough to take a big coach. We had to walk.

 

At the bottom of the tunnels we were able to see the 3   turbines, the blades of which are turned by the water from the reservoir to generate the electricity. The 3 turbines and generators produce 24 mega watts of electricity each.  The reservoir which supplies the water to generate the electricity is not close by, but 45 kilometres away. The water gets to the hydoelectric power station  through a  4.5 metres wide tunnel  which has been cut deep under the mountains.

On day 2 we visited the reservoir which supplies the water to the hydro electric power station at Muela, It is called the Katse Dam.

Katse is 2000 metres above sea level(Snowdon the highest mountain in Wales is 1085 metres above sea level) so you have to climb very high into the mountains along some quite scary bends in the road.

 

 

 The dam is 185 metres high and 489 metres  across.  It is a double curvature concrete arch,
one of less than 30 in the world. It has a capacity of 1950 billion litres of water. That is a lot of bottled water.