It has been decided to raise the level of water in the Cheboksarskoe dam lake in 2021. This was declared by RusHydro director on engineering policy Rasin Khaziakhmetov. According to the earlier plan a part of the Nizhniy Novgorod region was to go underwater already in 2016.
It should be reminded that 2010 was the year of issuing the executive order of the RF Government which presupposed the possibility of raising the water level of the Cheboksarskoe dam lake from 63 to 68 meters which would enable increasing the volume of electricity production as well as solving the problem of boat traffic at the shallowed Volga River. This decision immediately found both passionate proponents and vocal opponent. Among those in favor of the project was the government of Chuvashia and power engineers. The publicity of Mari El and the Nizhniy Novgorod region was against the project.
The project execution will result in the flowage of 59 population centers in the Nizhniy Novgorod region (and even the part of Nizhniy Novgorod itself) and up to 10 population centers in Mari El and Chuvashia.
However, in Khaziakhmetov’s opinion this is the personal problem of the residents since the territories to be covered by water ‘have always been situated in the so-called potential inundation area’.
— No residential construction should have been allowed in these areas from the very beginning, — Khaziakhmetov says as quoted by mass-media.
However, apart from villages the inundation area may include the “White Sea” – the burial place of chemical waste which can then get into the water intake structures of Nizhniy Novgorod and Dzerzhinsk. Besdies, the vicinities of Dzerzhinsk are the location of military manufacturing disposal which has not yet been studies as well as of animal burial sites.
Метки: environmental damage, Environmentalists’ Protests, Hydro power plant, RusHydro, Russian energy industry news
