Rybinsk Reservoir

The Rybinsk Reservoir (Russian Рыбинское водохранилище / Rybinskoje wodochranilischtsche ), which due to its enormous size (area 4580 km ²; storage volume 25.4 billion m³), is a reservoir on the Volga River in Russia is also called the Rybinsk Sea. He is part of the so-called Volga - Kama cascade and the second largest after the Kuibyshev Reservoir dam in Europe.

The plans for the construction of a dam began in 1935, from 1941 to 1947, the power plant was built.

In Rybinsk, 280 km north of Moscow, the Volga and its tributary Scheksna was dammed just before its mouth by separate dams. The dammed water masses flooded the river valleys of the rivers Volga, Scheksna and Mologa and formed the most 60 km wide and 110 km long Rybinsk Reservoir. He is part of the Volga-Baltic waterway which connects the Volga River with the Baltic Sea, and on the ships of the Caspian Sea can not only reach the Sea, but on the branching to the north Volga-Baltic channel also to the White Sea.

The dam height is 18 m, so that the water level is 102 m at normal water level above sea level. The backwater reaches up to the previous barrage of Volga in Uglich. Under the water disappeared two cities, about 700 rural communities and villages with 26,000 yards, 40 churches, three monasteries, dozens of former estates, not to speak of the forests, meadows and fields. The Yaroslavl region lost about one-eighth of its territory. 150,000 people had to be resettled. It is disputed whether the flooding of the city Mologa actually 294 people who did not want to leave their homes and had partly chained, were killed, as in a repeat of the Head of branch office Mologa of Wolgolag, Lieutenant of the State Security Skljarow, to his superior is reported.

In addition to the Volga, which opens to the south in the reservoir and leaves again in the southeast, open the Mologa in the northwest and the Suda and the Scheksna in the north near Cherepovets, in the lake, where the Scheksna in Rybinsk below the dam still a short distance flows in her old bed of the Volga.

In the dam ( ⊙ 58.08273238.826281 ) Scheksna of the hydropower plant with a capacity of 330 MW is integrated, the locks for the waterway located on the Volga River dam ( ⊙ 58.0966638.701715 )

Ivan Papanin, longtime director of the Institute of Biology of the reservoirs, examined the example of the Rybinsk Reservoir, the problem of overfishing and its sustainable use.