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Rogun, Tajikistan – From Dushanbe, the journey to Rogun begins like most journeys in Tajikistan. The closer you get to the outskirts of the capital with its wide, quiet streets and clean parks, then the cities start to fade away. The road turns into a small ribbon that climbs and twists between rocky mountains and small villages, before the Vakhsh River appears below as an angry blue thread that cuts through the valley.
There are no “travel pictures” on either side of the road – no fancy hotels, no big billboards, and restaurants competing to welcome passers-by. Only the mountains are silent, heavy trucks and workers are heading towards a major project almost every Tajik has heard of: the Rogun Dam.
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In a country that knows the true meaning of winter cold, power outages and dangerous areas, this dam concept has become more than just a wall to block water. It has been the promise of more.
Indeed, the $5bn Rogun project, which was launched in the mid-1970s to tackle Tajikistan’s energy shortage, was described by President Emomali Rahmon as a matter of “life or death”.
The country, which has been suffering from winter power shortages, sees the dam as an opportunity to reduce seasonal power shortages, increase energy efficiency, and possibly eventually sell the remaining electricity to neighboring countries.
Narrow mountains are a big dream
It takes about two hours to drive from Dushanbe to Rogun. The road itself is only part of the story. Each turn opens up a new landscape: sharp rocks covered in greenery, deep valleys, scattered buildings, and a river that never stops flowing.
Along the way, trucks full of stones and heavy goods pass by, and it is clear that the project is not being built in an easy place.
Everything seems difficult: to find, dig, transport, and control the river that originates in the Central Asian continent.
Approaching the site, the shape of Rogun begins to appear, not as a whole picture at once, but as scattered pieces of a larger landscape: dirt roads, large structures, excavated mountains, entrances until, finally, the dam takes shape.
The first thing that visitors to Rogun will see is not the height of the dam, but the sheer size of the entire project, which resembles a working city suspended between a mountain and a river.
When the sound of the machine is heard in the rocks, the dust comes out and the workers move like part of a huge unsteady machine.
The mountain seems to have opened up from the inside. There is no single form of this project, but several stages, inputs and methods. You see a road going down, another going up to the workplace, and a third leading to the opening of a black tunnel that looks like the entrance to the bowels of the earth.
Rogun is not a water barrier, but a whole network of canals, turns, canals and equipment under and around the mountain. Water doesn’t just come on concrete; it goes through complex engineering designed to control the Vakhsh river and convert its energy into electricity.
At the tunnel gates, the harsh outside light dims, the air cools, and the sounds of machinery are heard more clearly. Inside, you can’t see the river, but you can feel it as it is directed, diverted, forced, and then released through these veins to the electric generators that run the homes, factories and schools.
The project includes hydraulic tunnels ranging in length from 1,100 to 1,500 meters (3,610 to 4,920 feet), and an underground power station with six sections.
The turbines are waiting for water
On the part of the project that is designed for electricity, the vision of all this is clear. This is where the water that has come down from the mountains is released with a calculated force, and it is sent to harm the big turbines that rotate under pressure and convert the flow of water into electricity. That electricity will power cities and towns, factories and homes, hopefully providing relief from the winter, and perhaps an economy independent of the outside world.
Dreaming of numbers
Near the construction site, the Italian engineer Andres – part of the team of the Italian company Webuild, which is in charge of the major works on the Rogun Dam – speaks enthusiastically.
Pointing to the mountain and then the river bank, he tells the audience that when completed, the pool will be 335 meters (1,100 feet) tall, making it the tallest pool in the world. The power plant will also consist of six large units capable of generating approximately 3,600 megawatts of electricity.
This, he explains, is a fully integrated system: a dam with a clay core, hydraulic channels, an underground power plant, and large turbines that will gradually come online as parts of the project are completed.
They have used the power of the mountain, he says. “We are not building on nature; instead, we are trying to understand and use its power carefully.”
Today, Rogun has a place in the world’s imagination as the “Project of the Century”. This type of mountain may not have much oil storage, but it does have something: streams coming down from the top of the mountains, which can be converted into energy. Therefore, the dam represents Tajikistan’s gamble on its land, and an attempt to turn adversity into strength.
However, this gambling is not dangerous. As its Italian manager says, this huge project requires a lot of money, careful management, strong safety guarantees and good management by the downstream countries, which have a lot of control over the water supply.
Geographically and politically, collecting water behind the dam is not unique to Tajikistan; is the part of the water system that affects the region.
“The hill here is not just an obstacle, but it is part of the strength of the work.
On the way back to Dushanbe, the mountains begin to slowly descend, but the picture of the dam has not changed. Dark streets, waiting power plants, heavy trucks, and a river running dry between rocks; together they summarize Tajikistan’s relationship with water.
When you arrive in the capital in the evening, and the lights are shining on Rudaki street, it is difficult not to see them differently. Electricity is not an ordinary service. It is part of that distant river, that open mountain, and the canals that people work on unseen by most people.
