Word: pechora
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...world looks upon all these resources and salivates. Texaco, Exxon, Amoco, Norsk Hydro and other transnational oil companies are setting up joint ventures to tap into the enormous oil and gas reserves scattered through Siberia, including the Timan Pechora basin above the Arctic Circle (where the recoverable reserves are estimated at nearly 4 billion bbl.). Canadian, American and other Western mining companies are prospecting for gold and other minerals. Norwegian and Japanese interests are negotiating to increase shipping between Europe and Asia by way of arctic waters north of Siberia...
...either case, the environmental damage could be devastating. Says Warner Chabot, an official with the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation: "If the oil enters the Pechora River and flows into the Barents Sea, it will destroy wetlands, salmon runs and breeding grounds for shorebirds." Conditions in the Arctic are so harsh that plants and animals already live on the edge of survival. It can take decades for a tree to grow just a few feet, and tire tracks in tundra vegetation may persist for up to 100 years...
Much of the information coming out of Komi is suspect. A local civilian defense official asserted firmly, for example, that "not one bird, not one animal has died" from the oil. That's highly implausible, even if it were possible to know such a thing. Bibikov insists the Pechora River was unaffected. Yet a spokesman for Greenpeace in Moscow says fishermen almost 300 miles downriver on the Pechora reported large amounts of oil in their nets last week...
...long ago as 1830, a czarist surveyor named Alexander Shrenk suggested a way of easing this imbalance by diverting the northerly-flowing Pechora River into the Volga, the great river that sustains much of southern Russia. But even in the 1930s, the Stalinist heyday of dam building and hydroelectric construction, the scheme was considered no more than a mammoth pipedream...
Grandiose may be an understatement. The enterprise involves two separate sets of river diversions. On the European side of the Urals, the volume of the Volga would be increased by funneling into it the flow of three major northern rivers, the Onega, the Northern Dvina and the Pechora. Officially sanctioned by President Leonid Brezhnev in his speech on agricultural goals two weeks ago, the European grand scheme is scheduled to be launched next year. The rerouting would require the building of 25 dams and numerous pumping stations. As the barriers go up, they would raise river levels a section...