Dam Disaster

1.0Introduction

One of the world's largest hydroelectric plants is Sayano Shushenskaya Power station Plant, with a dam of 245 m (800 ft) high and stretches 1 km (0.6 miles) crossways on the Yenisei River. The station opened in 1978, it supplies a quarter of RusHydro output and is a major power supplier to at least two smelters owned by United Company RUSAL, the world's largest aluminum producer (Boyko and Popov et al., 2010). The hydroelectric power station is located on the Yenisei River, near Sayanogorsk in Khakassia, Russia. Before the accident, it was well known the largest power plant in Russia and the sixth-largest hydroelectric plant in the world

In early Monday morning on August 17, 2009 at the -Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant (SSH), which is located on the Yenisei River, near Sayanogorsk in the Republic of Khakassia, in the southern region of the Russian Federation. By 8:00 a.m., technicians were on field operating multiple hydroelectric turbines at the plant, including Unit 2 and plant maintenance work on other equipment was continuing as usual. Other members of the plant staff were just arriving, ordinarily, the plant was performing practically well regardless of the many troublesome maintenance problems. If truth were told, just over a month earlier (July 2), RusHydro Public Corp. (RusHydro), the owner and operator of Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Power Plant, declared that the plant had set an all-time 24-hour electricity production record (Boyko and Popov et al., 2010)

Later on the same day, on August 17th, 2009 tragedy and major horrible incident happened in the plant and mainstream of the turbine had broke apart, costing the lives of 75 workers and total loss of 6,400MW and a significant segment of the supply to the local grid leading to power failure in the local area and forcing major users such as aluminum smelters to switch to diesel generator. An official report on the accident was issued on 4th October 2009.

This research...