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Romania Inland Waterways
As a result of a long-term effort to develop inland
navigation,
river transport increased by 50 percent during the 1980-85
period.
Except for the lower Prut River in the east and the Bega
Canal in
the west, commercial navigation was restricted to the
Danube
waterway. The Danube-Black Sea Canal, which became
operational in
1984, was the costliest engineering project in the
country's
history. The 64-kilometer canal linking Cernavoda and
Constanta
required excavating twice as much earth and rock as had
the Panama
Canal. The massive undertaking involved building some 150
kilometers of access roads, modernizing 80 kilometers of
railroad
track, and erecting thirty-six major bridges. Three
important new
port facilities were developed along the canal: Cernavoda,
projected to transload as much as 7 million tons annually;
Medgidia, expanded to handle 11.5 million tons a year; and
Basarabi, which had a capacity of about 1 million tons
annually.
With an average depth of 7 meters, the canal can
accommodate
seagoing ships as large as 5,000 deadweight tons and
drafts of 5.5
meters. The canal was projected to carry up to 75 million
tons of
freight annually, but in its first five years of
operation, traffic
was disappointingly light.
In 1983 work began on a twenty-seven-kilometer lateral
canal
running northeast from Balta Alba on the Danube-Black Sea
Canal
through two natural lakes to a new port being built on the
Black
Sea at Midia. Two new ports were built along the route at
Ovidiu
and Luminita. Officially known as the Poarta
Alba-Midia-Navodari
Canal, it was opened to traffic in late 1987.
In 1985 Romania undertook the second-costliest canal
project in
its history. The project would tranform the southern part
of the
Arges River into a seventy-two-kilometer navigable canal,
providing Bucharest a direct link to the Danube and the
Black Sea.
The project had originally been started in 1952 but had
been
abandoned shortly thereafter.
Upstream from Cernavoda, a chain of weirs and locks was
built
on the Danube to ensure a minimum navigation depth of 2.5
meters as
far as the Yugoslav border. Aside from Galati and Braila,
which
could be considered seaports, the most important inland
ports were
Giurgiu, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, and Orsova.
Data as of July 1989
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