Ialpugul Mare Dam

An earthen and concrete dam and pumping station on the Ialpug River near the village of Chirilovca in Gagauzia, impounding the Ialpugul Mare reservoir along the main road between Comrat and Vulcănești. The pump house is a long, low concrete block set directly into the riverbank, its face pierced by a row of circular intake apertures, ten openings of equal diameter running in a continuous horizontal register, now partially submerged and heavily corroded. Three remaining large-diameter steel pipes emerge from the structure at an oblique angle, collapsed and rusting against the bank, the machinery long since abandoned. The Ialpugul Mare Dam sits on the Ialpug River in Taraclia district, impounding a reservoir of nearly 2,000 hectares with a capacity of 70 million cubic metres of water. It was the centrepiece of the Yalpug-Taraclia irrigation system, the largest irrigation project ever undertaken in the Moldovan SSR. Designed to bring Danube water north across the dry Bugeac steppe to supply agricultural land in Gagauzia and the Taraclia district. The system was conceived and built across the 1970s and early 1980s by engineers at Moldhidroprovodhoz, the state hydraulic design institute responsible for most of Moldova's irrigation infrastructure. A 30-kilometre supply canal, up to 10 metres deep and 110 metres wide at the top, connected the reservoir to Lake Ialpug near the Danube, with pumping stations at intervals to push water uphill. The inauguration was timed for 1984, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the formation of the Moldovan SSR. The press called it the construction of the century. Unfortunately, it did not work. Water pumped from Lake Ialpug proved too heavily mineralised for agricultural use. The infrastructure was complete; the water was unusable. The largest irrigation project in the republic's history was abandoned without irrigating a field. The Ialpug valley had always been marginal terrain for water management: over 85% of the land agricultural, the river itself subject to declining flow and rising sulphate and chloride concentrations.