What’s going on with the Volga River? Russians need help.
Let’s start our acquaintance with what the Volga is and how large the scale of the problem is.
Volga — One of the largest rivers on Earth and the largest in terms of water content, basin area and length in Europe, as well as the world’s largest river flowing into a closed (internal) reservoir.
The length of the river is 3530 km (before the construction of reservoirs — 3690 km), and the catchment area is 1360 thousand km². The annual flow is 254 km³.
There are four millionaire cities on the Volga (from source to mouth): Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara and Volgograd. In the 1930s — 1980s, eight hydroelectric power plants were built on the Volga, which are part of the Volga-Kama cascade.
The Volga is inhabited by about 70 species of fish, of which 40 are commercial (the most important: roach, bream, pike perch, carp, catfish, pike, sturgeon, sterlet). During the times of the Russian Empire, there were 4 fishing seasons per year: in the spring (from the end of March to May 15–20), pike perch, bream and carp were caught; in summer (from July 15) — sturgeon (beluga, stellate sturgeon, thorn, sterlet); in autumn (from September 1 to November 1) and in winter, all species were caught through an ice-hole. The largest catch was in the spring, then in the fall, in winter the least amount of fish was caught. During the spawning season, from May 15 to July 15, fishing on the Volga was prohibited.
The sturgeon caught alive were sent along the river to various Volga cities, using special boats with slots for the passage of running water. For salting fish, the Sapozhnikovs’ enterprise alone consumed 16 thousand tons of salt annually. In winter, their shops sold sturgeons up to 4 meters long, containing up to 200 kg of caviar. Already at the end of the 19th century, the number of commercial fish in the Volga had greatly decreased. Some associated this with excessive fishing, others — with water pollution by oil, which heated the steamers. Many villages survive by catching fish from this river.
The water of the Volga and most of its large tributaries is currently very heavily polluted.
In 2017, the federal program “Preservation and Prevention of Pollution of the Volga River” was adopted. But seeing what is happening now with the river, one can draw a conclusion about how much the authorities and people in leading positions in Russia do not care about the country’s ecology!
Oil pollution.
Inside and in the immediate vicinity of the Volga basin, there are about half of all industrial facilities in our country, most of the oil refineries and tank farms, some of which were closed without a full range of measures to clean up the territory and storage facilities.
Such a concentration of sources of pollution with oil products against the background of insufficient control over their discharge has already led to the appearance of oil spills in surface waters, which is a significant environmental problem of the Volga.
Annual oil confinement and collection operations remove tons of fuel oil from the river.
Agricultural and industrial wastewater.
In modern agriculture and industry, a variety of fertilizers and chemicals are used, which interact with water in fields and workshops, forming a huge volume of polluted wastewater. Only some of them undergo the necessary cleaning before entering the river.
Growth of blue-green algae.
The Volga cascade of hydroelectric power plants actually broke the river into parts, reducing the speed of the water flow. This led not only to the sedimentation of suspended sediments and incoming toxic substances at the bottom, but I became the cause of another environmental problem of the Volga — the rapid growth of algae in the summer, when the water temperature rises and becomes favorable. These blue-green plants not only cover its shores, but in the process of decomposition they release a variety of organic matter, including poisonous ones.
Sewer drains.
Sewerage is not only an environmental problem for the Volga, but for all water bodies located near modern cities, regardless of their size.
People who will read this article, help save millions of fish, people, animals that will drink this water, do not let them die, spread it to all the media you can. Don’t let the Volga River die.
