Let's clean up Shardara

An authoritative commission from the akimat of SKO has already received a lot of projects, providing varying ways of resolving the problem.

Among absolutely and science intensive ones there are a number of proposals that don't even pretend to be independent engineering projects or new discoveries. Here a vast experience of good engineers, constructors, hydro-technicians, who worked for many years directly on Shardara, Syrdaria, or even in the whole Central Asian hydrosystem, from Naryn to Aral, speaks for itself.

Our fathers and grandfathers, who are pensioners for a long time already, write letters to the akimat, wishing to share their knowledge. And sometimes their propositions prove to be much more interesting, original, and, the main thing, practical, than certain fundamental researches of modern scientific research bureaus and engineering collectives.

Svetlana Koygheldinova, once engineer hydrologist and currently a pensioner, simply suggests to clean up the Syrdaria riverbed by means of the "asar" method. In summer when there is less water in Syrdaria and the lands flooded in winter show up naked, as well as a significant part of the riverbed itself, a sort of a subbotnik should be organised to clean up the silt. As in the ancient Egypt. However the benefit is obvious - the collected silt can be used to fertilise of any ploughed field. True, any visible effect in this case can be attained only if there would be masses that would be comparable with the construction of the same pyramids by ancient Egyptians.

Yerman Yestayev, former construction engineer, also a pensioner by now, makes an even more realistic proposition.

According to the ex-constructor, who worked on Shardara hydroelectric power station for many years, in general the problem of water reservoir is strongly exaggerated. Yerman Yestayev asserts that currently the volume of Shardara water reservoir has decreased significantly due to the silting. It should be said that during the whole half-century term of its operations, Shardara has not been cleaned up virtually at all. And now on the bottom of the water reservoir there are hundreds of tons of bottom sediments, silt, sand and stones, whose volume is measured if not in hundreds, than at least in tens of millions of cubic metres. That is, according to Yerman Yestayev, when information was circulated last winter that Shardara was filled up to 5.2 billion cubic metres, it did not correspond with reality at all. Actually, at least one quarter of this volume was occupied by the same bottom stratum, which simply remains literally invisible. Therefore now it is necessary to pay attention not only to the cleaning of the Syrdaria riverbed, but also to clean up the bottom of Shardara water reservoir.

Meanwhile, yet in Soviet times the mechanism of fighting the silting was elaborated by hydro-construction designers. Moreover, not only for Shardara, (Shardara water reservoir was still "young" then for the silting problem). However, for our water reservoir the proposed method has justified itself completely and it always remained a theoretical variant in the archives of design estimates for Shardara operations.

The method is simple and elegant - to clean up the bottom sediments a special well sand pump was invented yet in the 70-s. It works like a cesspool machine. A huge hose is dropped to the bottom and with a help of a powerful pump it acts as a vacuum cleaner pumping all bottom substance out to the surface and throwing it around to a 70 metre distance.

The pump is also good because it can sort out by itself the whole mass into sand, gravel and big stones. Correspondingly "fountaining" the sand to 70 metres from the shore, gravel and pebbles - to 30-40 metres, and leaving big stones by the shore.

In the conditions of Shardara lake, when the works will have to be carried out far from the shore and no pump would reach the bank line, the system can work on specially equipped pontoon barges. In this case it is necessary not only to provide freight rafts or barges, which would regularly transport the whole catch to the shores. Basically it is not a complicated task.

Let us add that together with the efficient cleaning of Shardara, thus hundreds of thousands construction materials are "extracted". Their value could perhaps not pay for all energy costs of the pump operations, but turn such technology into "gold".

Besides, such sand alluvia can be used also to clean up the Syrdaria riverbed, as well as bottoms of any other water reservoirs or rivers of Kazakhstan. The siltimng problems are typical for our water arteries.

According to Yerman Yestayev, the production of such well sand pumps is quite feasible for the Astana mechanical plant. In any case in the Soviet times their mass production was planned to be started. True, the well pumps were not produced then. Mainly because the development of new virgin lands and the construction of new irrigation systems were fashionable then. Besides, there was no interest in the maintenance of the hydro-facilities of the past.

Perhaps somebody will think that the proposition from the pensioner hydrologist is too banal. No grand scale or know-how. But against such really rational propositions all grandiose projects of our government to construct Koksarai and the same competition of projects look like amateur business.