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Romania Water
Along with an abundance of fertile soil, Romanian
agriculture
benefits from a temperate climate and generally adequate
precipitation. The growing season is relatively long--from
180 to
210 days. Rainfall averages 637 millimeters per year,
ranging from
less than 400 millimeters in
Dobruja (see Glossary)
and the Danube
Delta to over 1,010 millimeters in the mountains.
In the
main grain-growing regions, annual precipitation averages
about 508
to 584 millimeters. Droughts occur periodically and can
cause major
agricultural losses despite extensive irrigation. The
drought of
1985 was particularly damaging.
Despite relatively generous annual precipitation and
the
presence of numerous streams and rivers in its territory,
including
the lower course of the Danube, which discharges some
285,000 cubic
feet of water per minute into the Black Sea, Romania
experienced
chronic water shortages throughout the 1980s. Water
consumption had
increased by over thirteen times during the preceding
three
decades, taxing reserves to the limit. The 1990 official
forecast
envisioned consumption of 35 billion cubic meters, very
close to
nominal reservoir capacity. Large-scale agriculture and
heavy
industry were the major water users and polluters.
Personal
consumption was restricted by the growing scarcity of
unpolluted
drinking water, which could be obtained from fewer than 20
percent
of the major streams.
The Danube and rivers emanating from the Transylvanian
Alps and
the Carpathians represent an aggregate hydroelectric
potential of
83,450 megawatts. Roughly 4,400 megawatts of this
potential had
been harnessed by the mid-1980s--mostly during the
preceding two
decades. Important hydroelectric stations were built on
the Danube,
Arges, Bistrita, Mare, Olt, Buzau, and Prut rivers
(see
fig. 3).
These stations generated roughly 16 percent of Romania's
electricity in 1984. But chronically low reservoir levels
in the
1980s, caused by prolonged drought and irrigation's
increasing
demand for water, severely limited the contribution of
hydroelectric power to the national energy balance
(see Energy
, this ch.).
The country's water resources also were an increasingly
important transportation medium. The government invested
billions
of lei in the 1970s and 1980s to develop inland waterways
and
marine ports. The Danube-Black Sea Canal, opened to
traffic in
1984, was the largest and most expensive engineering
project in
Romanian history. Major investments were made to modernize
and
expand both inland and marine ports, especially Constanta
and the
new adjacent facility at Agigea, built at the entrance to
the
Danube-Black Sea Canal. Another important project--still
under
construction in the late 1980s--was a
seventy-two-kilometer canal
linking the capital city, Bucharest, with the Danube
(see
Inland Waterways;
Maritime Navigation
, this ch.).
Data as of July 1989
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