Photo credit: (c) Cristian NISTOR / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

In fact, the Olt River, having the second-largest flow in Romania, can be considered to be the first in the country that was fully regulated, with no less than 13 hydropower stations placed along its course, in Valcea County only, starting with the one in Robesti, continuing with the ones in Cornetu, Gura Lotrului, Turnu, Calimanesti, Daesti, Ramnicu Valcea, Raureni, Govora, Babeni, Ionesti, Zavideni and Dragasani, and with another one still being under construction in Caineni.

‘The Olt River, like any other mountain river, in fact, has always been difficult to handle, not only the localities situated in Valea Oltului (Oltul Valley), in the gorge area and in Tara Lovistei (Lovistea Land), but especially those in the south of the county, where every year, every autumn to be more precise, and every spring, when we are facing heavy rainfalls, the river overflows and submerges the arable land,’ said the Valcea Prefect, Dumitru Cornoiu.

Thus, in the mid-1970s, the authorities started a project known to those who studied geography back in the communist era as ‘the chain of hydropower plants on the River Olt.’ It is about a system of power stations that was meant to help in at least three ways: first of all, it was supposed to regulate the river course and also the river flow due to the dam and also to generate electricity by using the water force and irrigate the agricultural land by using the water from the reservoirs.

As a novelty, there is a fourth sector in which the hydropower system built on the Olt River seems to be useful, that is the tourism sector, as the lakes are also used nowadays for recreational purposes.

‘The basic, simplified, principle used in building a hydropower plant, is that the construction works will take several stages to complete. Thus, corresponding to the first stage will be the diversion of the watercourse to expose the riverbed so that the workers can build the facilities there, the second stage will be for the actual works at the dam and the dykes to be conducted, for bringing back the waters in their original riverbed, and also for collecting and redirecting the water flow through the plant, and, finally, the third stage will be for the installation of the hydro-aggregates and implicitly the commissioning of the facilities,’ said engineer Mihai Sporis, former director of Hidrolectrica Valcea.

Before 1989, these operations used to take three up to four years, at the most, to complete, given that construction works were carried out simultaneously at three hydropower stations. That’s why, 11 of the abovementioned facilities were made in approx. 10 years, during which time such brands of the Romanian industry as Energomontaj, Hidroconstructia, UCM Resita, Lugomet, Carmoet and also Hidroelectrica, got to be consolidated. In 1989, they began the construction works at the last hydropower unit ever built in the Valcea County, namely CHE Caineni, which today, due to the current bad economic shape of Hidrolectrica (undergoing insolvency) is subjected to a preservation procedure.

The history of the hydropower system actually began in Valcea in the mid-1960s, when the most complex hydropower system was based here, namely the Lotru-Ciunget power generation complex. Special engineering works were carried out on the Lotru River between 1965 and 1985, resulting in the building of 160 kilometres of adduction galleries and a complex diversion and power intake system, for storing the water from the limitrophe river basins in one single reservoir, Vidra, the third by size in Romania.

The average annual potential of the Lotru basin is of 1,243 GWh, out of which 510 MW are used by the CHE Ciunget power plant, representing the largest installed power used on Romanian rivers and the second one after the Iron Gates II. The energy recovery from the reserved flow which is the Vidra Lake is done by discharging the falling water flow in three stages between 1,289 m elevation and 300 m elevation, through the Ciunget, Malaia and Bradisor power plants, Ciunget and Malaia being built underwater.

For all these reasons, Valcea is nicknamed the capital of the hydropower system in Romania. It has the largest number of such complex hydropower plants in the whole country and two regulated rivers, Olt and Lotru. Unfortunately, tens and hundreds of workers lost their life while building these power generation complexes.

As a curiosity, in 1980 the former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is said to have wanted a single huge hydropower station built at the Olt River gates, on the spot of where today is the CHE Cornetu power plant, explained Mihai Sporis. It would have been an immense construction, with a reservoir designed to measure approximately 40 km in length, to reach as far as to the border with Sibiu County. However, Ceausescu gave up the idea of this project, when he realized that he was supposed to relocate two localities and raise the road and the railway up to a height of 50 m, on the mountainside. At the same time, the geographical area known as the Lovistea Depression would have disappeared under the water.

The complex hydropower plants on the Lotru and Olt Rivers have severely changed the relief in the north of the Valcea County. There have been, of course, numerous disputes on this topic. Personalities in the ecology field claim that all these works have triggered a huge catastrophe for man, while determine the changing of the ecosystems here, the fauna and flora in the region being very much affected by the deforestations, detonations and the urbanisation process that took place in this region. It is said that many types of fish that used to migrate along the Olt River course disappeared, as the river was turned into a network of lakes linked through cascades to one another. The Ostrov Island from Calimanesti, a special spa and deondrological park, was also sacrificed, although it could have been saved, according to some opinions, on condition that the CHE Calimensti plant would have been located a little further than its current location, downstream the Olt River. There are, however, some ecologists, as for instance Professor Gheorghe Ploaie, Phd., who is saying that Valcea gained ‘no less than 7 new deltas, ecosystems, in the area of the reservoirs on the middle course of the Olt River, with a specific vegetation and fauna to the delta.’

Important transformation were also seen in demographic terms, with the opening of the construction sites in the 1970s-1980s having attracted here Romanians from all over the country, small towns such as Brezoi, Babeni or even some of the neighbours belonging to the Ramnicu Valcea Municipality have significantly increased in size.

Some archaeological sites and historic monuments also suffered because of the construction works at the hydropower plants, but, fortunately, three major objectives from the cultural and historic heritage of the area could be saved: the Roman camp Arutela and the ruins of the Old Cozia church were relocated and restored in new locations, while the Ostrov Hermitage church, rebuild by Neagoe Basarab back in the 16th century, was raised to a higher level, the same as a part of the Ostrov Island.

However, despite everything else, the Lotru-Ciunget hydropower complex and the ‘chain of hydropower stations on the River Olt’ represented an irrefutable economic achievement, which, among other things, contributed to the prevention of the natural disasters that used to periodically hit this region, when the Olt River overflowed its banks (and the same when the Lotru River overtopped its bank), which natural disasters were for the first time recorded in history related to the destruction of the Roman camp located on the left bank of the Limes Alutanus fortified line.

‘If the case would be that the Olt and Lotru rivers weren’t regulated, now, in the summer of 2014, we would have for sure witnessed a catastrophe, we would have seen a third of the county territory submerged, if not even more,’ concluded Prefect Dumitru Cornoiu. AGERPRES