Inaccessible Snezhnogorsk: the village of power engineers, from which residents leave

Once, builders and engineers from all over the country traveled to Snezhnogorsk, and today its population is melting before our eyes, since it is becoming increasingly difficult to live in the Far North in a small village. But Snezhnogorsk was not built at all for the development of oil and gas deposits or unique ore minerals, like most inhabited places in the north of our country, but for the creation of a unique hydroelectric station. This structure is one of the most northern on our planet, and given that we built it in incredibly difficult climatic and geological conditions, the Ust-Khantai hydroelectric station can be called a real miracle.

The hydroelectric station is located in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, on the Khantayka River, the right tributary of the Yenisei. After the construction of the dam on the river, a grand Khantai reservoir was formed with an area of 2,230 square meters. km This is a very picturesque reservoir, in which many valuable breeds of fish live, including char, taimen, whitefish and a very rare Siberian sturgeon.

A hydropower plant in such a remote and sparsely populated region was needed for one purpose - providing Norilsk, which is 160 kilometers north of Snezhnogorsk. The development of valuable deposits of copper-nickel ores, the operation of concentration plants and a metallurgical plant required a tremendous amount of energy, which could be obtained only with the help of a hydroelectric station.

Work on the construction of the dam began in the distant 1963. The village of Snezhnogorsk, existing at the hydroelectric station, was built from scratch. Workers worked in the harsh subarctic climate, when winter temperatures often dropped below 40 ° C, and snow falling on the roof swept the workers' houses. The dam was completed by 1970, although the hydroelectric station began its full-fledged work only in 1975. The dam on the Khantayka River consists of three sections: a 72-meter-high channel rock-fill dam and two stone-earth dams. The total length of these dams exceeds 4.8 kilometers. The total capacity of 7 hydraulic units installed at the station is 460 MW. Currently, the station is upgrading equipment, including the replacement of hydraulic units, after which its capacity will increase by 50 MW.

The population of Snezhnogorsk during the construction reached almost 10,000 people. But after the dam was completed, builders and their families began to gradually leave Snezhnogorsk, and today there are no more than 1000 people living in this inaccessible place. The city does not have land transport links with Norilsk or other neighboring settlements, although it is officially part of the city of Norilsk. The difficult conditions of the north, the lack of necessary social facilities and transport isolation led to the fact that residents began to leave Snezhnogorsk.