A giant meteorite, environmental disaster, or something else? In the Verkhnebureinsky District of the Khabarovsk Territory, the Bureya River was blocked. As a result, the channel of the high-water tributary of the Amur was blocked by almost a kilometer in length and 40 meters in height. Above the formed dam, water has already begun to rise. The details were found out by the Vesti FM columnist Sergey Artemov.
What happened is not clear. It is not known exactly when. Today, only these phrases can describe what happened in the Khabarovsk Territory, where the deep tributary of the Amur - the Bureya River - was suddenly completely blocked. A local hunter unexpectedly ran into a blockage a week ago and posted a video on the Internet on his return home last Friday.
HUNTER: We are, along the way, not in the epicenter. But behind this mountain or a meteorite lies … All the hills are bare, everything flew away. You can see the scale approximately, right? There is Bureya, and this is the mountains in the middle of the sea. That is, exactly a week has passed since we arrived when we discovered this. A dam was formed - from a hill to a hill. You see, there are no trees on the hills at all, just a bare desert.
The person who is filming the surroundings is standing on a huge array of earth, hard rocks and debris - in fact, in the center of the former riverbed. And here is what the head of the Verkhnebureinsky district Alexey Maslov told us.
MASLOV: This is on the Bureya river, which feeds the Bureya hydroelectric power station today. What happened there, only God knows, but the scale of what happened, of course, is colossal. At a distance of 70 kilometers from the village of Chekunda - this is the village of Verkhnebureya district - a certain situation occurred, which entailed an overflow of the main channel of the Bureya at a distance of 700 meters in length, up to 80 meters in height and up to 400 meters in width.
Reports immediately appeared on the tapes about a certain meteorite that fell on the slopes of the hills. What should be a celestial body capable of moving at least 30 million tons of soil? We addressed this question to the head of the meteoritics laboratory of the Institute of Geochemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences Dmitry Badyukov. The scientist expressed doubts about the cosmic causes of the phenomenon.
BADYUKOV: In principle, there should be a mass of at least 20 - 30 tons, penetrating into our atmosphere, and on approach - somewhere, maybe several tons. Most likely, this is an ecological disaster. I think it's just because of the deforestation. When your forest is cut down, then everything falls down for you - landslides or mudflows that block the flow of the river.
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Dmitry Badyukov bases his position on the absence of eyewitnesses to the fall of the meteorite, if any. And its dimensions should be similar to the one that flew to the Chelyabinsk region almost 5 years ago.
BADYUKOV: In Chelyabinsk, it was about 20 meters in size, flew into the atmosphere, but somewhere around 1-2 tons fell to the ground.
And then the trail from the meteorite and the roar of its explosion were noticed in tens of kilometers around. Windows were shattered in the walls of many houses and businesses. Nearly 500 people were injured. And here what is called not a rumor or a spirit.
The area where the blockage arose is deserted, to the nearest villages - Chekunda and Talakan - about 70 kilometers. There are no logging brigades there, and it is impossible to take out round timber: there are no roads there either. It is also difficult to imagine an option with rafting down the Bureya River: there is a huge Bureya hydroelectric power station downstream, and power engineers are unlikely to approve of the flow of logs towards their dam. Most likely, a person is not involved in this in any form, says Alexey Maslov.
Maslov: Of course, I do not come across such things every day, but I am 100% sure: it is impossible to do this with man-made things. There is no road there - for 100 kilometers. Today specialists from the Ministry of Emergency Situations went there, literally an hour ago they confirmed the information, took all the measurements. The Bureya channel is completely blocked. The colossal scale of earthworks. That is, the impact was at an angle, not vertical. We, of course, do not exclude the fall of some technical means, but, as a rule, technical means still fall vertically. Here it was seen that the object came in at a large angle, because it smeared the hill along the Bureya channel.
Seismic stations in the Far East have not recorded earthquakes in this area in recent days. There were also no rocket launches from the Vostochny cosmodrome located relatively nearby. However, even a fallen waste stage - an empty piece of iron, in fact - would hardly have done something like that.
The RusHydro holding, which manages the Bureyskaya HPP, informed us that the station is now operating normally. The company's special expedition to the scene also confirmed that the river was closed. The press release says "landslide". The turbines are still being rotated by the water accumulated in the Bureya reservoir. And further calculations of the operation of the hydroelectric power station will be based on various scenarios for eliminating the blockage of the channel.
By the way, regular Sunday measurements of the water level near the dam of the Bureyskaya hydroelectric power station showed its decrease by almost 2 meters from 9 to 23 December. She dropped another 12 centimeters this morning. And these indicators directly affect the capacity of power units. The less water, the lower the output.
On the other side of the dam on the Bureya, on the contrary, there is already evidence of an extremely rare and unpleasant phenomenon - a winter rise in water, said Alexey Maslov.
MASLOV: The water has already begun to rise in front of the dam. Small, but already confirmed by the weather station. This is the first time we have such a situation, and it is difficult to determine the level of water rise today, because we have never encountered this. But we have time to make a decision. We took measurements today; tomorrow, in a day, we will determine how much the water will rise. Then we will be able to draw some conclusions and make a decision. Now it is difficult to do this, but we see that it began to rise.
Among these conclusions and decisions may be the declaration of an emergency in the settlements of Chekunda and Ust-Urgal. They are located low on the shore. In Ust-Urgal, in addition, there are road and rail bridges across Bureya.
The specialists of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, who got to the place, managed to confirm the scale of the incident before dusk. The first conclusions about its causes will most likely come tomorrow. It will take much more time to come up with a solution - how to clear the Bureya channel.