Rogun Dam. Tajikistan - A Video

[BigH]

G'day all,

Hope you all have survived Saint Patrick's Day.

Thought you might like to see a video (Tajik tv) of a visit by the Tajikistand President late last year. Sorry that all the commentary is in Russian (or Tajik) but you can look at the photos and get an idea of the magnitude of the project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DULsIpKyIww

 

[GeoEnvGuy]

Geomembrane for a dam proposed to be very tall, I hope there was some testing to chose the thickness and lifetime prediction. I also like the picture of of 10 haul trucks dumping at the same time with another 20 ahead of them waiting there turn all supervised by the one engineer.

 

[BigH]

(Please keep my comments to yourselves . . .)

Oh yeah . EPC contract. Geomembrane will not be 'in place' long term. When they reach the next "level" which is when the core of the dam will be up to the level needed, the geomembrane will be removed. We did not like the idea of the exposed geomembrane - it was "designed" by Carpi to be exposed - but in reality that would be for dams that do not have blasting in the area. We pushed the Contractor and his designer to fully protect the geomembrane as we were worried about flyrock from nearby blasting - and they did for about 75 m each abutment. However, a week or so ago, flyrock landed on it and punctured it in a number of locations - luckily almost all above the reservoir water level although divers apparently have seen some punctures below the water level. Obviously this will be a contentious issue between two contractors. Had they listened to us and protected the whole geomembrane, most likely not an issue.

This video was shot during the President's visit so you can be sure that a lot of "staging" was done to ensure it looked like the work was going on full-bore. We have seen a lot of problems with the Contractor's QC department being able to manage what some might call "an out of control sub" - the other issue is that the alluvium being placed ranges from 0 to 700 mm and we get a lot of the big boulders rolling over the edge leaving segregation. When we are there we can conjole them to mix it back up but the Contractor's supervisory personnel and QC personnel have little control. Their QC staff are pretty good but they are geared towards paperwork in the field - getting signatures which takes away from their ability to actually do QC control in real time on quite a bit of fill placement which was exceeding 30k m3 per day. Only 1/2 the problems!

 

[Ron]

Pretty amazing project! Thanks, BigH