Surface Water Sources for an Earth Dam in Mbabuande River Catchment Area, Gwer West LGA, Benue State, Nigeria

Abstract

A dam is a structure placed across a flowing body of water to stop the flow. It is the barrier that stops or restricts and divert the flow of water into a reservoir/ water course. In Mbabuande village in Gwer-west local government area of Benue state, Nigeria; river Kpukuru, a seasonal river is located at the southern part of Tse-Ilyu village, (Mbabuande) and flows towards the northern side at a very high velocity during rainy season due to high slope. This makes the river to dry quickly, leading to water scarcity among the inhabitants throughout the dry season. Wells dug to augment surface water availability in the dry seasons dry up quickly due to the rapid growing human population. The community has resorted to constructing small earth dams using hand tools, but such earth dams easily dry up. The need for alternative solution to the water supply problem in Mbabuande calls for this research; to investigate and provide baseline information on the surface water potentials from the catchment area. The dam location and the catchment boundaries are marked on 1:50,000 map, and being a small earth dam, the area topographical map and river tributaries were used to measure the catchment area for the surface water. The catchment tributaries were taken from Areas marked as D, E, F, G, A and back to area D. The amount of water the catchment produce was determined from design peak runoff rate formula. Annual rainfall, runoff and evaporation losses were equally determined. Water requirement of the 3 communities in Mbabuande was determined using water demand for domestic purposes, livestock and building structures. Domestic water demand/consumption was calculated from water demand for drinking, food processing/ cooking, bathing, clothe washing and utensils washing, using standard estimate for a single person /capita/day. Census data for the

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