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| Home > News & events > 2007 feature stories > Saving Peter’s city from floods | ||||||
Saving Peter’s city from floods |
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Seen from space courtesy of Google Earth, the flood protection barrier in the Gulf of Finland off the coast of St Petersburg is a mega-project to rival the Hoover Dam or the Pyramids. “It’s the biggest construction project in eastern Europe,” says a satisfied Sergei Kruglik, head of Rosstroy (Russia’s Federal Agency for Construction, Housing and Communal Infrastructure). At 25 kilometres in length, the barrier cuts across the Gulf of Finland and over Kotlin Island in the middle and will protect the people, economy and cultural treasures in Peter the Great’s city. It consists of the 11 sections of the barrier; six sluice gates to allow water to flow through the barrier and prevent stagnation in the bay; two navigation openings for St Petersburg’s busy port traffic; and underground tunnels for road traffic. “The main navigation opening required a construction site the size of 100 football pitches,” explains Sue Goeransson, EBRD’s lead banker on the project. “Each of the two floating gates weighs 3,000 tonnes. Imagine the engines needed to lift that,” says Mr Kruglik. “This Barrier is so big, we had to have two cement works in operation just to satisfy its needs.” Bridge completed Such is the satisfaction with the project’s progress that those making it happen braved biting winter winds in the middle of Neva Bay recently to celebrate a milestone. They officially opened the barrier’s new lifting bridge spanning one of the navigation openings. In attendance were EBRD officials along with Mr Kruglik, Valentina Matvienko (St Petersburg Governor), Ilia Klebanov (Russian Presidential Representative for the north-west region) and Vladimir Kogan (Deputy Head of Rosstroy in charge of barrier construction). They were accompanied by a horde of journalists. The barrier is big news because it has been under construction, on and off, for 26 years. It was 65 per cent complete when construction halted toward the end of the Soviet era. In 2002 the EBRD agreed to lend the Russian Federation $245 million – the Bank’s largest loan ever – to help complete the project. Flood protection will be operational from 2008, although other aspects of construction, such as roadways, will not be fully complete for another four years at least. Along with related EBRD-backed sanitation, refuse and transport projects in St Petersburg, the barrier is part of a national project to preserve and improve the glittering city which, like Venice and New Orleans, was built in a flood zone. Built on a swamp In 1703 Peter the Great chose as the site for his new north-western fortress a mist-covered swamp where the Neva river runs into the Baltic sea. About 10,000 conscripts died in building the fort but Peter sunk enough rock into the ground that he finally got his town. As historian Orlando Figes tells it: “The notion of a capital without foundations in the soil was the basis of the myth of Petersburg which inspired so much Russian literature and art,” not the least of it Pushkin’s beloved poem The Bronze Horseman. Preventing catastrophe The price modern-day Russians now face in preserving beautiful St Petersburg and its palaces and museums (particularly the Hermitage) is over $2 billion, the estimated final price tag for the flood barrier completion. The threat of inundation in St Petersburg stems from city’s siting at the end of a narrowing bay, explains EBRD Project Engineer Evgeny Smirnov. “When the wind blows the wrong way in Neva Bay, the water comes up like a tidal wave.” The city has flooded every year for 300 years, and twice yearly in recent years. The worst was in 1824 when the waters rose over four metres, left 569 dead, thousands more injured or made ill, and over 300 buildings washed away. The barrier is similar in design to one now protecting the Netherlands port of Rotterdam and is engineered to handle a once-in-a-millennium catastrophe, which could happen tomorrow, says Ms Goeransson. Building capacity For both the Bank and Rosstroy, their engagement in the flood barrier was as much about building capacity in the government bodies to manage big infrastructure projects – and the funds used to build them -- as it was about erecting a physical structure. “Project implementation and thus disbursement of our funds initially went very slowly because of frequent management changes within Rosstroy. Once Mr Kruglik became head of Rosstroy in 2005 and Mr Kogan was charged with coordinating all works related to the barrier construction, things began to improve, thanks to a more tightly-structured management system,” says Ms Goeransson. “Thanks to the management system the EBRD helped us to develop, more has been done on this project in the past 14 months than was done in the previous 10 years,” says Mr Kruglik. He adds: “Working with the EBRD has been a good training ground for our people. Money is not so much a problem for us today. What we get with international financing is discipline and project management skills. Borrowing imposes higher responsibility and reliability on government agencies implementing projects. If we had done it only with our own federal budget, the results would have been quite different. We’ve already given government funds to municipalities and we’ve ended up with no money and no expected results. This is not a Russian phenomenon, it’s true anywhere.” The project has been supported by donors including Japan, the Netherlands, Taipei China, the United Kingdom, the European Commission and the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership.
By Kate Dunn, Senior Communications Adviser
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