It is dawn at Enguri dam, here in Jvari, Georgia.
I gesture towards a hulking yellow crane perched precariously over the lip of the dam. “Does that still work?”
“Yes, of course,” answers Sandro, my companion for the day’s activities. “Was built by the Soviet Union. To last for generations.”
This was a recurring theme that kept coming up throughout my daylong trip to Enguri. I arrived early this morning, armed with all these urgent questions about the massive hydroelectric dam’s flaws and its needs; the obstacles that lie in its way; the considerable challenges that confront its operators. But the men to whom I posed those questions (and yes, they were all men) seemed not even to accept my basic premise.
The chief of the dam, having worked on the site for 40 years, told me that that “it can stand forever” if they continue to care for Enguri. The Chairman of the dam’s board of directors told me the dam can easily function for another 200 years. Perhaps most tellingly, when asked what has changed most during his 26-year tenure at Enguri, the dam’s chief engineer responded, “Nothing.”
I came here to Enguri looking for a crisis, and for the militant alarm that crises inspire. After all, much of the dam’s power infrastructure lies across the administrative border line in Russian-held Abkhazia, where Georgia can do little to control runaway power consumption and the attendant pressures it places on Enguri’s physical wellbeing. Precarious levels of sediment (silt and sand) have backed up behind the dam, and there is no economical means available to flush it out. Emergency repairs begin next year to spare the dam’s subterranean pressure tunnels from catastrophic failure. Despite generous inflows of foreign development aid, Enguri is still aging – and it shows. Plans for a lavish tourism center are unlikely to generate much new revenue for the dam’s upkeep. Here, at the site of the one of the Soviet Union’s greatest engineering triumphs, problems seem to multiply wherever one looks.
And yet. There is no panic from the men who run Enguri. Concern, yes. Pride, certainly. But above all there is patience – and acceptance. Enguri has stood this long. It will stand for many more years to come. The maddening stalemate with Abkhazia’s Russian patrons is a fact of life. It can be managed. Over time, a trickle of new equipment and maintenance can keep the worst problems at bay. Newer dams upriver will help lessen the accumulation of new sediment at Enguri. With luck, the tourism center will increase awareness of and affection for Enguri, generating jobs for the local Megrelian minority in the process.
Maybe the men that I interviewed just didn’t want to share their deeper concerns with an outsider. But I somehow doubt it.
Enguri is the size of a small city. Its tunnel system runs for 15 kilometers. Its scale is so vast that pictures fail to do it justice. I spent more than an hour today just staring at the thing.
In that light, it does seem rather silly of me – the excitable, inexperienced American – to assume that I understood what was at stake here. Time and geology aren’t the enemies at Enguri. They are realities to be respected. In my mind, this power station functions as a microcosm of all the vast challenges that confront Georgia itself. But for the people here, the dam is a part of the landscape. It exists, and they exist in tandem with it. Enguri isn’t in crisis. It simply is.
-- Jesse Y., Cohort 4