Walk along the Maloalmatinsky gorge.

"Nature's idle spy,
I love you, having forgotten everything around you,
Watch out for the swallowtail
Over the evening pond"

Afanasai Fet. "Swallows".

Trip to the Medeo dam from Almaty.

Dam in rises immediately behind the high mountain. In 1966, to protect against mudflows, the Maloalmatinsky gorge was blocked by two unique directed explosions. A complex hydraulic structure rose to a height of 150 meters. A huge mudflow reservoir has been built on the southern side of the dam, and the river flows through a tunnel. The mudflow protection structure is located 15 kilometers from Almaty. Construction began in 1964 and was carried out using blasting. The first explosion took place in 1966, the second in 1967. The rockfill dam of the first stage (height 107 meters, body volume 5,000,000 cubic meters) formed a mudflow reservoir with a capacity of 6.2,000,000 cubic meters and was put into operation in 1972. In 1973, it detained a powerful catastrophic mudflow with a mass volume of 5.3,000,000 cubic meters, which significantly exceeded the capacity of the mudflow reservoir. The dam withstood the pressure of the mud-stone mass and flood waters, part of them was diverted using a system of siphons and sluices. After this mudflow, a decision was made to build the 2nd stage of the dam, which was completed in 1980 and significantly increased the capacity of the mudflow reservoir to 12.6 million cubic meters.The height of the dam above sea level is 1750 meters above sea level and was raised to 150 meters, the length along the crest is up to 530 meters, the width at the base is 800 meters.

In June 1973, the city was cool and rainy. But it was even rainier and cooler in the mountains above the city. The snow falling on the glaciers powdered last year's crust, which had not completely melted. And the precipitation was not light - more than 17 centimeters fell in the Tuyuksu area. Almaty residents were waiting for summer.

And summer has come. July began with unbearable heat at the foot of the mountains. And above, above the city, from July 9 to July 15, the temperature was 5-10 degrees higher than usual. Water, freed from unmelted snow, compacted firn crystals, and “eternal ice” of Alpine glaciers, began to rapidly transform into its usual liquid state. Too fast!

Melt waters revived the glaciers, decorated their surface with thousands of colorful streams and dotted them with winding invisible passages inside. Malaya Almatinka, which had been blandly purring over the rocks the day before, turned into a stormy foamy stream of muddy water. The Alma-Ata ditches began to sing - each with its own unique voice (in those days they were not yet en masse locked in identical concrete gutters and retained their own characteristics), spreading the coolness of the glaciers through the streets of the city sweltering from the heat. Well, the Almaty residents, as usual, quickly got enough of the obsessive joys of summer and, with the unanimity with which they cursed the rain the other day, began to curse the heat.

Malo-Almaty glaciers and Tuyuksu moraine / Photo by Andrey Mikhailov

But Almaty residents are Almaty residents. The heat is hot, and everything else is on schedule. In those days, the public who went to the cinema enthusiastically watched “The Headless Horseman” (with Oleg Vidov and Lyudmila Savelyeva), and theater lovers looked forward to meeting the touring Soviet Army Theater (“And the Dawns Here Are Quiet...”, “Uncle Vanya” , “Rinaldo goes into battle”, etc.).

The young people habitually stood in lines for ice cream and walked languidly through the twilight in romantic trios - he, she and the little transistor.

Music lovers were awaiting the announced arrival of Yugoslav artists (Vishna Korbar, Dalibor Brun, the Akademik ensemble) with a pop program simply titled “From Song to Song.”

The boys excitedly discussed the upcoming football match, a landmark, fundamental one - between “Kairat” and “Pakhtakor”.

The elderly, according to the old tradition of the “colonel’s city,” came out in the cool of the evening to sit on benches in front of their houses, scold the trams and trolleybuses (it turned out that the repair base had not been updated since 1936!), moan about another failure in the next “Sportloto” round, read your favorite "Evening" ("Drunk L. Golovatsky was crossing the Krasnogvardeisky highway opposite the "Kindergarten" stop. Then he was hit by a Volga. And after the Volga in the right lane there was a Moskvich, so a second collision was made on the intruder pedestrian." What passions!)

The life of the city flowed as usual. The same could not be said about those flows that went beyond the ordinary in the highlands. Melt waters stubbornly filled the notorious moraine lakes. This alarmed experts. The concern of Kazhydromet employees led to the appearance on July 13, 1973 of a corresponding warning about mudflow danger. It sounded from all home receivers immediately after the weather forecast. The gorges were immediately blocked by police posts, but a large number of wild and organized tourists managed to get into the mountains before the ban. And these were not only Almaty residents - in the Union, the Trans-Ili Alatau enjoyed well-deserved fame among all lovers of active recreation.

One of the moraine lakes near the Molodezhny glacier / Photo by Andrey Mikhailov

However, until July 14, the situation, although alarming, was not critical. Everything could still work out. The “point of no return” was passed by the evening of the 14th, when a melted mass that collapsed somewhere inside the moraine clogged the watercourse through which two moraine lakes were being emptied. Well, and then... Then, perhaps, there was no longer any opportunity to avoid the inevitable.

However, a proactive option, if not avoided, then at least minimized the disaster, still existed. Those same preventive drains of moraine lakes, which at the very least relieved the situation before and which are still used, for some reason were not carried out on the critical days of July 1973. Later, when I worked in glaciological expeditions and the Kazhydromet system, there were persistent rumors on the sidelines that after the construction of the dam on Medeo, these preventive descents were decided not to be carried out anymore. If all this is true, then the tragedy that took place the next day has more than just a natural component.

For a whole day, the elements accumulated strength for the final throw, gathering energy and eroding the moraine shores of the lakes. The breakthrough occurred in the evening of the next day, July 15 - at 17.54. In 30 minutes, 200,000 cubic meters of glacial water poured out of the lakes. This whole mass became a mudslide after it fell down the steep slope of the Tuyuksu moraine, taking with it the solid component - stones, ice, sand.

After 9 minutes, the mudflow reached the first barrier, erected specifically to tame it - an embankment dam and mudflow reservoir near the high-mountain weather station "Mynzhilki". It took the stream 3 minutes to overflow the mudflow reservoir, and a few seconds to break the dam. Thus, what should have been an obstacle to the disaster only increased its scale.

Well, then, crushing and absorbing everything that was within its power (and the forces were enough to move granite boulders weighing 300 tons!), the mudflow rushed towards the sun-weary city. Anyone can see the power of his fury even today - to do this, just climb up the Maloalmatinsky gorge. That canyon with crumbling slopes, along the bottom of which Malaya Almatinka now flows, appeared precisely on July 15, 1973.

“The movement of the flow was accompanied by a strong roar and shaking of the slopes. When the mudflow struck sharp turns and rapids of the riverbed, a massive ejection of boulders was observed to a height of 15-20 m, and smaller stones scattered within a radius of 40-50 m. When the mudflow passed in the valley, there was "a continuous dust cloud with a burning smell. It was formed as a result of strong splashing of mudflows and the collapse of slopes, and a mixture of burning arose from the collision of stones."

Traces of the mudflow near Gorelnik are still visible / Photo by Andrey Mikhailov

Picking up everything in its path, the roaring stream on the approach to the Gorelnik tourist center had dimensions ten times greater than those observed at the Mynzhilki weather station. And here on his way he encountered another man-made protective barrier, which also played a fatal role in the development of the disaster - a mudflow trap built from steel rails, similar to those through which everyone who gets to Medeo passes. Before breaking through the barrier, the mudflow, firstly, “jumped” up on it (like on a springboard) and caught the houses of the legendary camp site, and secondly, it once again gained additional mass for the downward throw.

The main casualties were collected that evening at Gorelnik, where a shift change was just taking place, and a large crowd of people stood in line at the warehouse to receive equipment. And the warehouse, unlike the rest of the camp, was located below, at the bottom of the gorge, along which a deadly stream was moving.

In terms of human casualties, the mudflow that occurred on July 15, 1973 in the Malaya Almatinka gorge remains one of the darkest disasters in the history of Almaty. Apparently, it was due to the fact that most of the relevant documents were immediately classified as classified. But they knew about those who died in the mountains, it was impossible to hide it, and, as usual, rumors only increased their number.

Why didn’t the Union like to count victims? Complex issue. It had both overtly political overtones and a practical element. It was believed that there was no need to agitate the population in vain. The fact is that in the memory of Almaty residents at that time there were still pictures of the mudflow that destroyed the city in 1921; the stones brought then still lay uncleaned on some streets. Even more recent were the experiences of ten years ago, which deprived the townspeople of their favorite vacation spot - Lake Issyk. By the way, information about those killed in those previous disasters is also vague and has not yet been officially clarified.

Now, from somewhere, a clearly rounded and approximate martyrological figure has appeared - 100 dead at the Gorelnik camp site. One of the eyewitnesses of the tragedy provides other information in his memoirs: “Personally, my opinion is this: at the Gorelnik tourist center on July 15, 1973, 7 employees of the tourist center and about 50 tourists died in a mudflow in a mudflow. The KGB (now the KNB) probably has more accurate data. but they never published them."

The first mudflow, 15 meters high, 50 meters wide, with a force of 100 tons per square meter shook the Medeo dam at 18.17. Direct eyewitnesses of this were four policemen who were on duty at the dam at that moment. They reported down about the catastrophe that really loomed over the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan.

The moment of the last jerk of the mudflow onto the dam in Medeo is still captured in someone’s photo / Photo taken by an eyewitness on July 15, 1973 from the dam

The city below continued to live its usual life, bathing in the streams of long-awaited coolness flying from the mountains. None of the mere mortals felt anything alarming or menacing in this coolness. And I had no idea that the capital had several days ahead that it might not survive.

But more on that next time.

(To be continued)

multi-ton blocks polished by water and wind. You meet them not only high in the mountains, they are piled up in the vicinity of Alma-Ata and even in the city itself, on the streets leading to mountain gorges. These are the marks of a mudflow that managed to reach here, to the city blocks...

THE STONES SPEAK

Giant granite “nuts” are also hidden in the ground. They are discovered by excavator operators who have to prepare pits for new houses or pipelines. These are already signs of mudflows, earlier in age, but apparently no less severe.

Alma-Ata residents are well aware of the nature of mudflows and their insidious nature. Born far in the mountains as a result of rapid melting of snow or heavy rains, masses of water, saturated with mud, rush down the beds of mountain rivers at the speed of an express train.

A rapid mud-stone flood, washing away narrow gorges, captures trees and boulders on its way, which, like ice floes, float in a mudflow. Large mudflows cause enormous destruction.

Here is some information about the mudflows that raged in the Malaya Almatinka River basin over the past 80 years.

The year is 1887. As a result of the earthquake and heavy rain, a mud-stone flow - a mudflow - was born at the sources of the Bolshaya and Malaya Almatinka and other smaller mountain rivers. A large amount of loosened rock was transported. The mudflow did not reach the city of Verny (as Alma-Ata was previously called).

The year is 1888. The melt waters, having broken through the reservoir formed by the avalanche debris, rushed into the valley of the Malaya Almatinka River. Several blocks of Verny were disfigured by mud and stone debris.

The year is 1889. The torrential rain caused a mudslide that swept away several city streets.

The year is 1918. The mudflow demolished buildings and bridges in the upper reaches of Malaya Almatinka.

The year is 1921. Catastrophe. The rain overflowed the tributaries of Malaya Almatinka - Sarysay, Chimbulak, Gorelnik, Komissarovka, Kazachka, Batareika and Butakovka. Having absorbed their power, Malaya Almatinka threw a mudflow onto the city, sweeping away everything in its path. The enraged flow carried out about 7 million cubic meters of water and 3,250,000 cubic meters of stone, sand and clay from the mountains in six hours. Naturalist V.N. Shnitnikov, who witnessed the disaster, described its consequences this way. Following the first mud flow, “at night... a high shaft of semi-liquid mud rushed towards the city, carrying huge boulders of stone and destroying everything in its path: houses, trees, fences. Everything caught by this rampart was destroyed and razed to the ground. The first shaft was followed by the next, and so, at intervals, several such grandiose mud shafts passed through the city.” The disaster destroyed dozens of houses and killed a large number of livestock.

Mudflow 1921 Head Aryk (now Abai Avenue) was broken through by a mudflow

Mudflow 1921 Destruction on Kopalskaya Street (now Kunaev Street)

Then the mudflow reminded of itself 11 more times.

The year is 1956. August 7. The collapsed moraine of the Tuyuksu glacier splashed down a stream of mud and stones, which destroyed hydrometeorological structures, bridges, and the road leading to Alma-Ata. The river carried huge boulders with a roar. It was strange: there was no rain, but water in the city, to use the proverb, was “at least a dime a dozen.” True, these streams did not run through the streets for long; they dried up as quickly as they surged.

The year is 1963. July 7. During the day there were rains and thunderstorms in the mountains. In the afternoon, a mountain flood born under the tongue of the Zharsay glacier, breaking through the moraine, unleashed its furious power on Lake Issyk. For eight hours, the mud and stone stream dealt crushing blows to the most beautiful lake, which had existed for thousands of years in the granite rim of the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains.

The waters of the lake, breaking through the barrier, rushed down into the valley. In the village of Issyk, two streets were demolished, many houses, shops and other structures were destroyed. The world-famous eight-thousand-year-old alpine miracle was destroyed in a few hours. Fortunately, the mudflow made its way far away from Almaty. He could have caused even more destruction in the city.

After this tragedy, the question of protecting the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan from the formidable elements arose with particular urgency.

ADDRESS: UROCHISHCHE MEDEO

This road, firmly grasped by the asphalt, is like a sorceress: it can show you spring and winter in half an hour, in September you will find August on it, and in March - February...

…After walking a dozen kilometers, you find yourself in Medeo. This picturesque tract, rightfully called the pearl of Almaty, is located a thousand meters above the city. This explains the “magic” of the road, which shows several climatic zones at once in a short period of time.

...But Medeo is also the gateway to the mudflow. Here, in the narrow gorge of the gorge, mud and stone flows more than once gained their destructive power.

The mudflow threatened the city. People were waiting for him and making attempts to avert this threat.

The first project to protect Almaty from mudflows was developed in 1934-1935. It provided for the creation in the river valley of a number of large mudflow protection pits, fascine barriers, and land reclamation work. In the thirties, a dam was erected in the Malo-Almaty Gorge, which performed a unique role as a regulator: it directed mudflows into the Vesnovka channel. Then a water divider was built.

In 1964, by decision of the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR, the construction of a gabion dam began at the foot of the Tuyuksu glacier. At an altitude of 3017 meters above sea level, the first barrier arose - a dam made of gabions - cages made of metal mesh filled with cobblestones. Of course, this dam is too weak to stop the mudflow, but it can reduce the speed of movement, make the formidable flow slower, and therefore more flexible. In addition, employees of SMU Vodokanalstroy installed three rubber-fabric pipes. Over the course of a day, they pumped up to 20 thousand cubic meters of water from the moraine lake of the glacier, thereby preventing it from overflowing.

Further down the gorge, in the area of ​​the Gorelnik tourist base, civil engineers erected several mudflow traps that were original in design. Design work on their construction was carried out for the first time in the Soviet Union by the Kazakh branch of the Hydroproject Institute named after S. Ya. Zhuk and the Kazakh branch of ProjectStalconstruction.

The traps at the base and on the slopes of the gorge were fastened with concrete, and all steel trusses on the high side were attached to special anchors embedded in the rocks using eight pairs of steel cables. The weight of each truss, welded from steel 40-centimeter I-beams, was about 27 tons, and in total each trap consisted of almost a thousand tons of metal, a thousand cubic meters of stone and almost seven hundred cubic meters of concrete.

The construction of these traps was carried out in the shortest possible time by employees of the Gidrospetsstroy department, the Kazakhvzryvprom trust, the mechanization departments of Kazstalkonstruktsiya and Kazmekhanomontazh of the Ministry of Construction of the Republic.

Well, what if all these structures turn out to be insufficient to hold back the pressure of the mudflow?..

WHY EXPLOSION!

When did they first start talking about the explosion? The author of the directed explosion project, senior engineer of Soyuzvzryvprom, Alexander Nikolaevich Kobzev, talks about this:

I remember the spring of 1954. The days were warm, the earth breathed widely, rejoicing in its awakening. On one of these days, Doctor of Technical Sciences Mikhail Moiseevich Dokuchaev, then also a senior engineer at Soyuzvzryvprom, and I wandered through the gorges of Malaya Almatinka. Our walk was not aimless; we were looking for the most advantageous and convenient place to construct a dam using an explosive method, which would become the shield of Almaty. The choice fell on Medeo.

The first project of a directed mass explosion for “dumping” was drawn up in 1957. It was planned to build a dam 93 meters high and 60 meters wide at the top. The volume of the designed dam was to be 2,250 thousand cubic meters. Only an explosion could produce such work in a short period of time. Why did you need to resort to it?

The fact is that the danger of mudflows for Almaty in recent years has been especially great. A mudflow could bring great troubles and destruction in any spring, summer or autumn. The protective structure had to be created between two mudflow seasons. It would have taken at least four years to build a dam in the usual way that would reliably protect the city. But during this interval a catastrophic mudflow could have occurred, which would have captured the unfinished dam, increasing its furious power many times over.

That is why experts and scientists settled on using the explosive method of constructing a dam.

But the builders were unable to immediately gain a step. Some scientists proposed their own methods of combating mudflows and rejected the main one - creating a shield with the force of an explosion. Their objections were listened to carefully: in essence, an experiment was being prepared in Medeo.

The questions were: whether the explosion would disrupt the integrity of buildings in the immediate vicinity and in the city, whether it would cause landslides, or whether the dam would become a source of irreparable disaster. The answers to these questions were given by outstanding Soviet specialists in the field of mining and hydraulic engineering, who thoroughly developed this issue theoretically and have already used “dumping” and “throwing” explosions in construction practice.

...The dam construction project was reviewed in detail and approved by the Scientific Council for the National Economic Use of Explosions at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences on February 17, 1960 in Novosibirsk and on June 23, 1960 in Alma-Ata.

When developing issues of stability of the dam in Medeo, the Hydroproject Institute named after S. Ya. Zhuk adopted parameters with a huge margin of safety, as for a first-class dam.

In 1966, the expert commission of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences again considered the issue of the explosion in Medeo and gave the conclusion: “There will be an explosion! Start an active fight against mudflows!”

THE FEAT STARTED LIKE THIS...

...Malaya Almatinka lashes the rocks with white fire. Every Almaty resident knows about the unbridled character of this mountain beauty. But the uncontrolled violence of the river, its treacherous companion - the mudflow, comes to an end.

But where will the waters of the river go when its bed is blocked by a dam created by an explosion in a matter of seconds? This was taken into account in the project: Malaya Almatinka, long before the explosion, should turn into a tunnel punched in the granite thickness of the mountains.

...During the excavation of the main mine chamber for a charge of 3600 tons, there were many examples of labor heroism of the workers of the complex teams of the Alma-Ata special department of the Kazakhvzryvprom trust. Explosive tunnelers Yuri Varava, Valentin Gladyshev, Vladimir Zagarin, Vasily Kubchenko, Boris Medvedev, Yuri Glinsky, forklift drivers for removing blasted rock Alexei Uzbaev and Alexander Shumilov, railway workers Boris Kudryavtsev and Sergei Lukashenko... Can you really list all the workers, engineers and technicians, selflessly working underground! In hard granite rocks, they passed through a chamber with a volume of more than 5,000 cubic meters for the main charge. The length of this unique chamber is 93 meters, width - 8 and height - 7 meters. The difficulty of the excavation was that the work had to be carried out in disturbed rocks with a significant influx of groundwater. This required creative searches, bold technical solutions for the construction of rod, arch and fire mounts. Due to the high height of the chamber, it had to be passed through in two tiers.

By the start of charging the cameras, more than 3,000 meters of tunnels, adits, and chambers had been passed and more than 10,000 cubic meters of rock had been removed.

On September 27, 1966, the first convoy of cars with explosives passed through the city streets, heading to Medeo to the site of the future dam. Special vehicles, accompanied by motorcyclists, had to transport several trains of TNT. The best drivers of the Almaty bases, such as Vladimir Lapshin, Mikhail Svetlichny, Vladimir Abeydulin, Mikhail Pechenykh, were entrusted with delivering him to the adits. Employees of the Almaty ORUD had to perform an unusual role for them as escorts. About six hundred flights. Not a single disruption, everything was strictly according to schedule.

The mine chambers were charged around the clock. 250 leading specialists from twenty departments of the country came to the aid of the Almaty bombers: Moscow and Leningrad, Tashkent and Novosibirsk, Murmansk and Karaganda and many others.

At dawn on October 13, loading of the largest mine chamber was completed. The head of the chamber, Gennady Ivanovich Tsoi, reported to the explosion headquarters: “3,604 tons and 126 kilograms of explosives were placed in the chambers.”

The charge, unprecedented in the world practice of explosives, was ready.

On the night of October 16, under the leadership of the deputy head of the charging section, Vladimir Ivanovich Petrov, the last 494 tons of TNT were laid.

Under the rocky right slope of the gorge, five peaceful charges - 5291 tons of explosives - were waiting for their due hour. Cars with sand went to the adits, which clogged the underground corridors leading to the chambers.

The Alma-Ata explosion is not a record for the weight of the charge system at 5,291 tons. During the construction of the Amu-Bukhara Canal, 9,352 tons of explosives were simultaneously detonated by many charges. The weight of one concentrated charge that opened the Altyn-Topkan ore deposit in Uzbekistan was 1,640 tons. This was a world record. The uniqueness of the explosion in Medeo was that 3,604 tons of chemical explosives were concentrated in one of its five charges. World practice has never seen such a quantity of explosives in one charge.

...Attaching great importance to the uniqueness of the explosion, about a hundred researchers and leading specialists from various institutions and organizations in the country were preparing to conduct numerous studies.

For a comprehensive study of the explosion, large scientific centers of the country were involved: the Institute of Physics of the Earth of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Hydroproekt Institute named after S. Ya. Zhuk, the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering named after V. V. Kuibyshev, the construction laboratory for drilling and blasting works of the Soyuzvzryvprom trust. , Kazakh Scientific Research Hydrometeorological Institute, Institute of Geological Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic, Institute of Exploration Geophysics, Kazakh Institute of Mining, Kazakh Polytechnic Institute, Kazakh Institute of Regional Pathology.

Numerous instruments listen sensitively to the voice of the mountains. Only a special expedition from the Institute of Earth Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences equipped more than 30 temporary points for recording explosion development processes within a radius of up to 300 kilometers. More than 50 kilometers of different types of wires and special cables that automatically connect equipment were installed. More than 130 seismographs have been installed. 12 movie cameras, which are “instructed” to carry out regular and high-speed filming, are aimed at exploding the eyes; the recording devices are placed in special vans with good shock absorption. A group of operators and engineers from the Kazakh Television Studio under the leadership of I.K. Smirnov and I.N. Deltsov installed four movie cameras with remote automatic start. One of them, in a metal frame, was waiting for a signal three hundred meters from the epicenter of the explosion.

...Evening falls over the mountains. With violet fire he burns the clouds into gray ashes. Bombers leave the mine station area. Only those who remain, led by the head of the Alma-Ata department of Kazakhvzryvprom, Suren Aramovich Simonyan, must install 48 electric detonators. Jewelry precision work. It is complicated by the fact that during charging, an original scheme for laying a detonating cord was used for the first time, penetrating the entire charge of the main and auxiliary chambers.

Electric detonators are attached to “militants” located in the depth of the explosives.

...At the start - an explosion!

VILLAGE IN TRAP

…The section of the road in Medeo from the “Most” stop to the explosion site is a dangerous zone. An alarming silence accompanies you to the last police post. The windows of empty houses look out onto the road with glass crossed out with paper tapes.

The population from this area, about 60 families, was evacuated and temporarily housed for safety reasons in the central regions of Almaty.

At the mine station, the head of the explosion, manager of the Kazakhvzryvprom trust, Israel Yakovlevich Itter, and the chief of the explosion headquarters, manager of the Soyuzvzryvprom trust, Sergei Aleksandrovich Popov. These are experienced bombers, but the explosion, which is to be carried out in a few hours, is unique, and they are naturally worried.

At the control post established near the rest house "X Years of Kazakhstan", the last consultations are given by the Minister of Public Order of the Republic Dmitry Aleksandrovich Pankov, Police Commissioner of the III rank Dzhanispek Kusmangalievich Kusmangaliev, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Alma-Ata City Council of Workers' Deputies Yesen Duisenovitch Duisenov.

A few kilometers from the mine station you can still see Kazakhvzryvprom cars, gas cars of scientists and specialists who arrived from Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Tashkent. Everyone has a lot to worry about.

...At 9:30 am the installation of the external explosive network is completed.

Deputy Chairman of the Government Commission for the explosion, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh SSR Kayum Mukhamedzhanovich Simakov checks the readiness for the explosion.

At the observation point one can hear: “Wave”, says “Mountain”... “Sopka”, “Wave” transmits: “The wind is favorable, northwest, at an altitude of 300-600 meters, 2-4 meters per second. The temperature is 4 degrees below zero.”

Dynamics of explosion development

One-hour readiness for the explosion was announced.

...In order to obtain data with the greatest accuracy, the engineer of the Ili geophysical expedition, Mikhail Alekseevich Brusilovsky, goes on air every five minutes. His signal will indicate the moment of the explosion.

An airplane is circling under the mountains. On board are specialists from the Office of the Hydrometeorological Service of the Kazakh SSR and the Scientific Research Hydrometeorological Institute, who will conduct special aerovisual observations.

The explosion headquarters receives messages about the readiness of all operational posts. In a few minutes, the practical results of the hard work of the scientists, engineers, technicians and workers who prepared this explosion will be obtained.

The chords of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto are on air. This is the explosion readiness password.

...One minute before the explosion. The mountain echo carries the hoarse voice of a siren. Hitting the jagged edges of the mountains, he rushes through the gorge.

There are moments in the day when radio operators around the globe ring with silence. The radio operators listen in silence. Bombers also have them. Five seconds of silence.

The blasting network is connected to the terminals of the KPM-2 capacitor blasting machine.

First beat of the metronome. The neon peephole flashes red fire. There are 1500 volts.

The head of the explosion, Itter, commands: “Blow up!”

Second beat of the metronome. The button of the blasting machine is pressed by the chief engineer of Lenvzryvprom, Georgy Ivanovich Plakhov.

Located in front of the main one, the first four charges were fired, which should create an artificial concavity in such a way as to make it possible to direct all the energy of the explosion into the “channel” determined by the calculations.

Four seconds of deceleration required to lift millions of tons of rock into the air. An instant burst of incredible energy. Flames rose above the clouds. Piercing crimson lightning. The main explosion, born at a depth of 150 meters, tore the body of the mountains. A directed peaceful charge, unprecedented on earth, energetically threw a mass of rock raised to a height of two hundred and fifty meters into the gorge. The earth shook gently. You can see how the torn out part of the mountain fits tightly into a place predetermined by calculations. The huge capacity mudflow trap is ready. The power of mountain rivers and the furious power of mudflows have been tamed. And the mountain echo, picking up the booming thunder, still carries it through the gorges. Expanding at a speed of 100 meters per second, a swirling black flower of explosion blossomed. Having broken through the clouds, it released a gas plume of almost one and a half million cubic meters into the troposphere.

On October 21, 1966, at exactly 11 o'clock in the afternoon Almaty time, seismic stations around the world recorded an artificial earthquake with an epicenter near Almaty. This was one of the rare cases when the stations were “tuned” to the known epicenter of the Earth’s breathing, and the residents of the city, at the threshold of which a vibration of the earth’s surface occurred, were warned about this in advance.

Malo-Almaty Gorge before and after the explosion

The seismic station "Earth" of the Talgar expedition of the Institute of Physics of the Earth of the USSR Academy of Sciences, located twenty kilometers east of the site of the unique explosion, recorded a movement of the earth's crust of 3 points.

The head of the seismic station, Rita Aleksandrovna Fogel, senior laboratory assistant Gennady Gavrilovich Starchenko and laboratory assistant Eleonora Dmitrievna Kalimulina, who were on duty at the instruments in Alma-Ata at that time, registered a oscillation of the earth's crust of 3-5 points.

In the city the explosion was barely noticeable. Against the backdrop of snow-white peaks, Alma-Ata residents saw somehow unusually slowly rising dark, tight clouds of smoke with crimson scorches. Growing every second, they went beyond the clouds. The explosive sound was dull, and for many it caused almost disappointment. They expected a much louder explosion. But this was just what suited the specialists. The energy of the explosion was not used to “shake the air”, but to do useful work.

GRANITE SHIELD ALMA-ATA

...The body of the dam contains 1,700,000 cubic meters of rock. The height of the dam in the lowest part is 61 meters, the width at the base is 470 meters and the same length at the top.

History knows a gigantic structure of the past - the 147-meter pyramid of Cheops, which 100,000 slaves erected over the course of a whole generation. The dam in Medeo, close in volume to the Cheops pyramid, was created by an explosion in a matter of seconds.

On this day, a gigantic explosion occurred in Medeo again. A charge of 3,941 tons threw at least a million cubic meters of rock into the body of the dam. Just like on October 21, 1966, everything worked well, the new rock lay exactly on the crest of the anti-mudflow shield of the capital of Kazakhstan, making it even more durable and reliable - eternal.

© G. BOGOMOLOV, Y. KUKUSHKIN
An excerpt from the book “It Was in Medeo”, published in 1967 in Alma-Ata by the publishing house “Kazakhstan”

The construction of the Medeo mudflow protection dam in the Medeo tract in the valley of the Malaya Almatinka River began in 1964 and was carried out using blasting operations. The first explosion (right bank) was carried out in 1966. The second explosion (left bank) was in 1967. The first stage rockfill dam, 107 meters high, formed a mudflow reservoir with a capacity of 6.2 million cubic meters and was put into operation in 1972. In 1973, the dam blocked a mudflow with a mass volume of 5.3 million cubic meters.

Creation of the Medeo dam. The first right bank explosion took place on October 21, 1966.
Medeo tract. Everything is ready to explode. The initial phase of the explosion. The apogee of the explosion. Rocky soil is laid in the body of the dam.

The mudflow occurred in the early evening of the weekend of July 15, 1973. At an altitude of 3500 meters above sea level, a breakthrough occurred in the natural dam of moraine lake No. 2 on the Tuyuksu glacier. The resulting mudflow destroyed a light dam in the Mynzhilki tract in a few seconds, swept past Chimbulak in a matter of minutes and demolished half of the Gorelnik tourist center. Unfortunately, most of the tourists were at that very site at that moment, and they all died.

The Gorelnik camp site was destroyed with such stones.

Then scientists calculated that the strength of the 1973 flow was 4 times higher than the strength of the 1921 flow. Then a quarter of the entire city's buildings were destroyed, more than 500 people died.

Fragments of the anti-mudflow trap on Gorelnik (above the Medeo dam).

A steel barrier, concreted into the walls of a narrow gorge, secured by ten steel ropes, each as thick as an arm, delayed the mudflow for just a few seconds. A shaft almost 30 meters high, having broken through a fifty-meter deep canyon here, rushed further - to the dam in Medeo.

Quickly breaking out from around the last turn, disintegrating along the foundation pit, it fell with all its weight onto the shield of Alma-Ata - the dam. The dam held. She obscured the city.

July 15, 1973, 6:15 p.m. The entrance of the first wave of mud-stone flow into the mudflow reservoir in the Medeo tract.
The mudflow hit the body of the dam and choked, filling the pit.

The waters of moraine lakes brought almost 4 million cubic meters of mud and stone mass to the dam. Three hours later, a second mudflow came down from the mountains, raising the water level of the resulting lake even higher.

Mudflow Canyon.

The next day, July 16, at 5:25 p.m., a post near the Sarysay River reported that there was a mudflow again. The same news was received at 21:10 from a post near the Chimbulak River. Mudflows from Sarysay and Chimbulak lasted a total of one and a half hours.

Having tamed the mudflow avalanche, the dam already held almost 5 million cubic meters of mudflow in its bowl.

Medeo tract. Mudflow lake, dam, high-altitude ice stadium “Medeo” (from left to right).

The dam withstood the first assault, but now the siege has begun. The mudflow clogged the drainage pipes. There was a real danger of overflowing the mudflow lake, which received up to 12 cubic meters of Almaty water every second.

Work on the dam began as early as 5 a.m. on July 16. It was necessary to use at least 12 powerful pumps and lay kilometers of pipelines. They began to install them immediately. At least 10 dredgers were needed, which were not available in Almaty at all; they were delivered by cargo planes from Moscow, Chelyabinsk and Orenburg, and on July 20 they began to work.

Mudflow lake behind the dam.

An emergency government commission to combat mudflows was urgently formed and took emergency measures to carry out emergency work. Hundreds of dump trucks, bulldozers, excavators, and pipe-laying cranes were sent to the dam.

"Construction" headquarters.

The army took on a lot of work (pontoon boats, construction battalion). The divers were civilians, from the Volga, there were also military men, from the Baltic, specialists in working in conditions of almost complete lack of visibility (plunging into the mudflow mass, a team of divers tried to break through to the blocked water intake of the dam).

Meeting with army commanders.

They began to urgently bring in equipment and people to organize pumping of water from the mudflow reservoir.

The cranes were pushed to the very edge, they stood on unreliable soil, but the people working on them were experienced.

Pumps on pontoons.

It was necessary to install three strings of a pipeline with a diameter of 1420 mm and a kilometer in length, and the welding seam had to be perfect - there was no way to fix it during pumping. We selected the best welders throughout the headquarters, they welded day and night, and at night the construction site was illuminated by spotlights.

Main work platform (left side).

Main work platform (right side).

On July 18, water filtration began in the body of the dam; simply put, leaks formed. It was urgently necessary to pour concrete. But concrete cannot be placed on a wet surface, and even if it is placed, it must dry for a certain time. On July 19, they began to spray the oozing streams with the help of ventilation ducts, and immediately concrete the surface of the dam, using the same fans for drying - the work of the Promventilation trust played a big role here.

Filtration - leaks in the dam (filmed in the evening, blurred).

Every day the water in the reservoir rose, hiding in its depths the tops of the spruce trees growing along the slopes. By 00:30 on July 20, it reached its maximum level. There were only 6 meters left to the top of the dam.

Work site.

The pumps started working and water began to be discharged.

When the pumps drove water through the pipes, the flow did not want to go down the bed prepared behind the dam. He began to destroy rocks, trying to rush into the ice stadium. And then Ugudey Akayev, Gennady Kupriyanov and Valery Gomonov made a “jewelry” explosion, which removed the threat from the sports complex facilities.

Discharge of water along the rocky slope of Mount Mokhnatki.

One and a half kilometers above the dam, the builders of the Alma-Ata-promspetsstroy trust, in record time, built a water intake, laid a conduit capable of taking the raging Almaty River into the steel channel, and, bypassing the mudflow reservoir, directing it beyond the dam. At noon on August 2, the damming of the river began, and within a few hours its conquered waters flowed at great speed along the channel laid by the builders.

Pumping water from Malaya Almatinka.

The fight against the consequences of the mudflow took place on both sides of the dam. It was still hot in the mountains, even near the glaciers. Every day they melted faster and faster, and thousands of streams rushed along the slopes, filling river beds to the brim. To prevent a new mudflow from the Tuyuksu moraine, a special team from helicopters dropped bombs onto the glaciers, creating a dense smoke screen from the scorching rays of the sun.

Completion of work. The mudflow brought a large amount of silt and mud; it was necessary to restore the volume of the mudflow storage tank. The soil was selected by excavators and removed.

"Medeo - days and nights of courage." Documentary film about the events of those days.
(Link to video if the embedded one doesn’t open: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1phOWYxMDBc)

Oraz Bisenov, one of the mudflow liquidators, head of the Glavalmaatastro department in 1973:

“When we were working on the dam, we didn’t think about fame or, as they say now, about PR - I generally kicked the film and television crews out of the construction site so that they wouldn’t interfere with their work, as a result of which I never got into the frame of the film that we We've just watched it, although this film is a valuable document on the history of Almaty - the city in which I spent my whole life building.

I was very proud then that we have such a city, which we protect from mudflows, such a republic and such a country - such a powerful centralized state that it can concentrate when someone is in trouble. I don’t know if this could happen now if this happens again?”

Website materials used:
Big Sel-1973: thirty-five years later

Alma-Ata is located in a basin at the very foot of the Trans-Ili Alatau ridge of the Tien Shan system, separating the endless steppes of Kazakhstan and the basin of the Issyk-Kul mountain lake. From Almaty to Issyk-Kul across the ridge is only 70 kilometers, and to the border with Kyrgyzstan running along the ridge is 35. The proximity of snow and mountains has always contributed to the fact that Almaty, despite its southern location, has developed winter sports. Today we will get acquainted with the mountain sights of the “Southern Capital” of Kazakhstan.

1. The high-mountain sports complex "Medeo" is located in the mountain tract of the same name at an altitude of 1691 meters above sea level. Everyone has probably heard the name “Medeo” at least once - this world’s largest high-mountain skating rink has long secured its reputation as a “record factory”. The high mountains and the purest glacial water contribute to the excellent speed qualities of the ice, and over 200 world records have been set here over the years. The first skating rink in the Medeo tract was opened in 1951, and the current high-mountain complex was built in 1972. The skating rink is open to everyone from October to May; in the summer there is no ice, but you can roller skate, play football or just take a walk and have a good time. It is easy to get from Almaty to Medeo by regular bus or car.

2. At the entrance to the sports complex.

4. In August there is no ice yet, and people on Medeo are involved in summer sports. And in this photo you can see a huge dam rising in the background, protecting Alma-Ata from mudflows coming down from the mountains.

5. Near Medeo there is the lower station of the cable car, leading even higher to the Chimbulak ski resort, located at an altitude of 3100 meters. We sit in the booth and soon admire the high-mountain skating rink from a bird's eye view.

6. The cable car passes directly above the mudflow dam, protecting the city below from an invisible but terrible danger. The proximity of the mountains has always posed a threat to Almaty - for example, in 1921, a mudflow hit the city from the mountains, which claimed more than 500 lives and destroyed about a quarter of the city's buildings. Less destructive were the mudflows of 1887, 1910, 1918 and 1956. Thus, in the second half of the 20th century, protecting a city of a million people from a new, much more serious, mudslide threat again became more relevant than ever. The construction of a huge dam in the bed of the Malaya Almatinka River began in 1964 and was carried out using blasting operations. In 1972 the dam was built.

7. And already in the next summer, 1973, the dam stopped a terrible mudflow with a volume of more than 6 million cubic meters - five times more powerful than the one that destroyed the city in 1921! It’s hard to say when the next mudflow will come: the mountains are constantly being monitored in this regard. But the main thing is that Alma-Ata is now protected by a reliable shield, and the mountains no longer pose a threat to the beautiful city. Today, after the work is fully completed, the mudflow protection dam in Medeo can withstand a mudflow three times larger than the one that came down from the mountains in 1973.

8. Behind the dam there is a mudflow reservoir. Today it is empty.

9. Drainage pipes are installed in the body of the dam, which, in the event of a mudflow and filling of the mudflow reservoir, ensure the outflow of water from the Malaya Almatinka River.

10. We rise higher. In the side valleys that branch off from the main one, smaller mudflow barriers are also installed.

11. The bulk of the main ridge of the Trans-Ili Alatau appeared ahead.

12. We are at the bottom station of the Chimbulak ski resort. It's summer, not the season, but there are still a lot of tourists. As a skier, it was interesting for me to explore the slopes of Chimbulak - they are not bad in principle; and there are even “black” tracks! :)

13. The next cable car leads even higher.

14. It’s summer now, but the cannons are still working - they moisten the soil of the ski slope, where excavation work is carried out in the off-season.

15. We reach the very top - there are mountains all around, and somewhere far, far below in the haze Alma-Ata is visible. How nice it must be to live in a city where such a cool ski resort is literally within walking distance! I would probably ride every day! :)

16. Majestic landscapes of the Trans-Ili Alatau.

18. View of Alma-Ata from the mountains. Gorgeous!!!

19. The height of the Talgar Pass is 3180 meters. At first, when you just get out of the lift cabin, you feel a lack of oxygen, but then you get used to the altitude and it goes away. In any case, I need to train - I have one very serious mountain climb in my immediate plans.

21. The Talgar Pass and the highest point of the Chimbulak resort are adjacent to several “home” peaks of Almaty - Chkalov Peak, Nursultan Peak (formerly Komsomol Peak), Shkolnik Peak, Fizkulnik Peak and others. The height of the mountain range separating the steppes of Kazakhstan from Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan is 4000-4600 meters. What it must be like to find yourself at the very top of the ridge: in one direction - Kazakhstan and Alma-Ata, and in the other - Issyk-Kul and Kyrgyzstan.

22. Relax in the mountains - and just enjoy!

24. I wonder if Issyk-Kul can be seen from there?

26. The Kyrgyz-Issyk-Kul topic is very close to Seryoga and me - after all, just two months before we visited the other side of the ridge and had a lot of rides around Kyrgyzstan. And now here we are on the other side of these mountains, in Kazakhstan - but comrade