CAIRO — Satellite images taken July 10 and showing around 200 million cubic meters (almost 53 billion gallons) of water pooled at the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) reservoir site have sparked controversy in Egypt amid fears that Ethiopia has started filling the reservoir. The Egyptian government, however, says the pooling water is due to construction and the 2017 seasonal Nile flooding.

On July 12, the Egyptian government stated that the water pools have no impact on Egypt's water quota. On the same day, Haytham Awad, the former head of the Irrigation Engineering and Hydraulics Department at Alexandria University, told Egyptian news outlets, “After analyzing the newly acquired satellite images of the Renaissance Dam reservoir site, it appears that a small new lake is being formed over a surface around 16 square kilometers [10 square miles].”

Awad told Al-Monitor that this quantity of water could be the beginning of a water-storage process or could be gone by the end of the flooding. If the former is true, “The filling by Addis Ababa of the Renaissance Dam before the end of the neutral technical studies conducted by international consultancy firms would constitute a breach of Article V of the Agreement on the Declaration of Principles on the [GERD project] signed between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia,” he said.

He noted, “The pooled water does not represent more than 1% of the Renaissance Dam’s lake [capacity] after completion of the dam. This lake will have a surface area of 1,680 square kilometers [1,044 square miles], and the reservoir would contain 74 billion cubic meters [19.5 trillion gallons] of water.”