Others say threat of disaster is remote near river.
Oleh Urmanov is in charge of
running the Kyiv dam and assures
that it is safe. (Kostyantyn
Chernichkin)The huge reservoir at the hydroelectric power plant is one of the prettiest places in Kyiv region.
Surrounded by woods on one side and green hills on the other, it’s clear why Ukraine’s president and prime minister, as well as the head of regional administration, chose to build mansions here.
But ecologists warn that the construction of luxury houses in the area has weakened the earthen dam on the Dnipro River, threatening to ruin this idyllic scene and even endangering parts of the nearby capital.
“The designers assumed that along the dam would be woods, not luxury cottages,” said Tetiana Tymochko, head of the All-Ukrainian Ecological League.
The 70-meter-long Kyiv dam was constructed in 1964-1966 and became the longest earthen dam in the world.
For years, Kyivans have worried that a collapse of the dam would lead to flooding of the low-lying districts of the city, such as Podil and Troyeshchyna. The cascading water could bring with it tons of radioactive silt that experts say lie beneath the reservoir. It accumulated there after the Chornobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986.
Such concerns were sharpened by an accident at the Soviet-era Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station in Siberia in 2009, when a turbine exploded, flooding the turbine hall and engine room and killing more than 70 people.
National and local television stories as well as coverage in some newspapers in recent weeks have fueled fears.
Some Kyiv residents seriously fear the catastrophe, while others deny or even joke about it happening. “The situation is really deadly dangerous, threatening one-third of Ukraine’s population,” wrote one Kyiv resident in comments under a website article about the dam. Another wrote: “They say for last five years that it [the dam] is sure to break from day to day… We are waiting.”
Experts are divided over the likelihood of a collapse of the dam.
Volodymyr Boreiko, head of the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Center, said no one knows for sure what shape the dam is currently in. Even a crack triggered by a massive flood, an earthquake, a transport accident or a terrorist attack may cause the collapse of the dam, he said. “Water flow of huge speed and strength will break a hole [in the dam] and will flood Kyiv’s left bank,” Boreiko said.
But Oleh Urmanov, who is in charge of running the dam for state-company UkrHydroEnergo, says a catastrophic dam collapse is extremely unlikely. Damage may cause no more than minor leaks, which may lead to only minor flooding of nearby gardens.
Other ecologists call the uncontrolled construction around the dam the main danger to its safety.
In recent years, the building of mansions among the picturesque surroundings has accelerated – even within several hundred meters of the dam.
Driving along a new road that runs over the top of the dam, Urmanov pointed out villas where top political leaders live, including Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and President Viktor Yanukovych. Some of the buildings are still undergoing construction.
Tymochko said the houses should not be built so close to the reservoir and in such large numbers, as this ruins its drainage system. Anatoliy Yatsek, director of the Ukrainian Scientific and Research Institute of Hydroeconomic and Ecological Problems, agreed, saying that the new houses “destroy stability and balance” of the dam.
Urmanov, the director, declined to comment on whether he thought the construction was dangerous for the dam, but he was very concerned his experts were unable to check the sites to see if they posed a threat of damage.
The engineers, who operate the dam, had no means to influence the construction, he added.
“They [the inhabitants] sometimes breed fish in culverts” that are used to collect the water that seeps out of the dam, he said. “We wrote letters to a prosecutor. But what can we do if the same prosecutor or judge catches fish there?”
Urmanov pointed in despair at two advertisements pinned to an antenna, offering a land plot for sale and the construction of a bathhouse within a few meters of the reservoir.
The antenna is part of the monitoring system, upgraded in 2002, using a loan from the World Bank that has the dam under 24-hour watch.
Vitaly Shubka, an engineer at the hydroelectric plant, heads a team that monitors the dam from the plant’s safety and control center on computers. He welcomed the Kyiv Post at the monitoring center and showed the screens that receive new readings every two hours from monitoring equipment, including video cameras and sensors within the dam itself.
Shubka and dam director Urmanov said there is no reason to worry, and call talks of a catastrophic collapse “baseless rumors.”
Urmanov said the dam was constructed to operate for 100 years, and has been running for less than half of that. He dismissed concerns about earthquakes, and said the dam could cope with even the most severe flood recorded in the last 300 years.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
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