Lake Péligre

Lake Péligre
View from National Route 3
Location	Centre Department
Coordinates	18°54′30″N 72°0′0″W / 18.90833°N 72.00000°W / 18.90833; -72.00000Coordinates: 18°54′30″N 72°0′0″W / 18.90833°N 72.00000°W / 18.90833; -72.00000
Type	reservoir
Primary inflows	Artibonite River
Primary outflows	Artibonite River
Basin countries	Haiti

Lake Péligre (French: Lac de Péligre) is the second largest lake in Haiti, and is located in the Centre Department. Tracy Kidder describes it as "beautiful, blue waters set among steep, arid mountains".^[1]

It was created as a result of the construction of the Peligre Hydroelectric Dam on the Artibonite River in 1956–1957. The project was designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and financed by the Export-Import Bank of the United States. According to Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains, Brown & Root was a contractor in the Péligre Dam project.^[1]

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the dam. Much of the benefit of the dam's construction has gone to a small group of wealthy individuals, at the expense of the poor farmers who utilized much of the land that is now submerged. The extreme poverty those displaced families have faced has largely been untold, but is often mentioned in the talks of Dr. Paul Farmer; "if you saw with peasant eyes, the scene looked violent and ugly, a lake that had buried the good farmland and ravaged the highlands."^[2]

References

notes

sources

• Kidder, Tracy (2003). Mountains Beyond Mountains. New York: Random House Publishing Group. pp. 1–300. ISBN 0-8129-7301-1. Retrieved 2011-03-17.