Lake Nzilo
body of water

Lake Nzilo (formerly Lake Delcommune, also Lac del Commune) is a reservoir formed by a hydroelectric dam on the Lualaba River in the Haut-Lomami Province of the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It is about 10 miles (16 km) northeast of the major copper mining area of Kolwezi.
The reservoir was originally named after the Belgian soldier and explorer Alexandre Delcommune.
Dam
The dam with hydroelectric power plant was built to provide power for copper mining operations.
The infrastructure of this plant is four units and has a design capacity of 100MW. The last unit was commissioned in 1953. It is currently operated by SNEL (Societe Nationale d'Electricite).
Reservoir
The reservoir also provides a source of water for these operations.
The site was an area of wetlands along the Lualaba River before it was dammed. Some of the habitat around the lake is swamps.
It has been stocked with fish, and is now an important site for waterbirds.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lake Nzilo” as body of water. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3214837. Authority coordinates are -10.560, 25.628. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lake Nzilo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.