Stanca-Costesti dam filled to capacity

Containing roughly 900 million cubic meters of water, the Stanca-Costesti dam on the Nistru river is now filled to capacity, with water levels constantly rising, a spokesperson for the Civil Protection Service told Info-Prim Neo. On Tuesday at 15:00 dam levels were 96.67 meters above sea level. As they continue to rise, authorities are considering opening the valves to release huge amounts of water from the dam. Waters outpouring from the dam reservoir have reached crop fields on both banks of the river. In the event of a “technically impossible” dam failure, a 7,700 hectares wide and 40 meters deep lake will flood a number of settlements in the Republic of Moldova as well as in the counties of Botosani and Iasi, in neighboring Romania. At present, all the residents of the settlements deemed to be at risk have been displaced. Out of 3,141 evacuated persons, 1,502 are from Rascani district, which is in the dam range. The dam, built to temper freshets, to provide people with drinking and irrigation water, for fish farming purposes and for electricity, was designed to contain a maximum of 1.3 billion cubic meters of water, but is believed to have the capacity to retain 1.5 billion. The clay-core, 43 meters high Stanca-Costesti dam was built in 1978 through joint efforts by the Socialistic Romania and Soviet Moldavia. The dam forms a namesake lake which has 59 square kilometers in area. In addition, Stanca-Costesti is a crossing point at the Moldo-Romanian border.