Turgusun (river)

The name of the river is of Mongolian origin and means a fast river ( Mong. Turgen us ) ^[1] .

From the middle of the 18th century, serfs began to flee to Turgusun from Altai factories. It was here that the Old Believers looked for the famous Belovodye .

In 1902, the French engineers, who acted on the order of the tsarist government, built the Turgusun hydroelectric station. But in one of the spring floods, the water washed and destroyed the dam.

In 1932, Soviet specialists re-started the construction of a power station on Turgusun. On the first day of 1936, the Turgusun hydroelectric station gave its first current. Operation of the Turgusun HPP was carried out until July 15, 1957, when the Bukhtarma hydroelectric power station and the cascade of hydroelectric power plants in Ust-Kamenogorsk on the Irtysh River were built .

In 2013, the Kazakh authorities decided to restore the hydroelectric power station near the village of Kutikha 400 meters above the old hydroelectric power station. The specially created Turgusun-1 LLP developed the design documentation for a small hydroelectric power station with a capacity of 29.4 MW with the involvement of Russian and Chinese specialists. In the village of Parygino , where the central control tower will be based and where there is a sand and gravel quarry, a crushing and screening complex is installed, and a concrete plant and a shift camp are located directly at the construction site. The Parygino railway dead end was constructed on the route Ust-Kamenogorsk - Zyryanovsk (now Altai) and stretched up the river 10 km of a high-voltage power line to the hydroelectric power station. The total cost of the facility amounted to more than 12.5 billion tenge ($ 33 ​​million). It is planned to install three hydraulic units. Two of them - with a capacity of 11.5 MW, the third - 1.9 MW, designed to run in the winter months with a minimum water pass (10-12 cubic meters per second). The commissioning deadline is the end of 2018 ^[2] .

However, the commissioning dates of the small hydropower plant have shifted by about a year due to the powerful floods of 2018 and 2019, which flooded the construction pit 8 times. The spring flood of 2018 lasted 3 months, which, judging by archival data, occurred for the first time in 56 years ^[3] .