Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
its swiftly flowing waters in summer, as well as its thick ice crust in winter pro-
vide an inviting arena for a host of activities by the region's inhabitants, the ice
floes and frigid waters that make up the river in late spring and autumn are ex-
tremely dangerous for human beings.
Therefore it is not surprising that living on and with the Kemi River has for a
long time been more of a cyclical process than an advancement in degree of con-
trol. Many structures on and across the river have long been - and some still are -
temporary. Where a ferry links two parts of a village in the summer, an ice bridge
is constructed in the winter, when the ferry is of no use. During the spring flood,
neither ice bridge nor ferry connects the two shores, as the ice has been washed
downstream and the ice floes on the river, as well as a highly increased discharge,
prohibit the operation of a ferry. People cannot cross the river, but instead of get-
ting frustrated about this, they attend to activities around their homes that do not
require travelling to the other side. And lucky school children have a reason to
miss class. For timber floating, temporary embankments were built over one hun-
dred springs and summers and deconstructed in the fall. Over the winter, a great
many bays in the river's shores were used to store the booms from which the
structures for timber floating were reassembled anew each spring, when the ice
began to weaken. During late spring and summer, the river was first and foremost
a road for logs that made their way from the vast inland forests to the industrial
centres at the seashore. Salmon weirs are only one more case in point and to the
list can be added many more uses of the river. Such arrangements suggest that
both social and ecological life is inherently seasonal (cf. Mauss 1979) and our re-
cent obsession with powerful, permanent structures goes against this dynamic.
Hydroelectric dams, however, are essentially meant to control the flow of the
river, rather than to flow with it. Dams impound reservoirs and regulate the level
of lakes, they attempt to control the annual spring flood, influence the amount of
discharge and determine the surface level along the river. Arguably, the hydroe-
lectricity company has attained a considerable degree of control over the Kemi
River. The flow of the river can be attuned to the demands of the common elec-
tricity market of the Northern European countries
9
. Apparently, the river is made
to live according to the rhythms of modern human life - not vice versa.
In order to achieve this degree of control, however, substantial social and eco-
logical costs have been incurred and a host of negative side-effects has been pro-
duced. The elevated water level made many shore-based farms unviable, because
they depended on the annually flooded fields for hay production in order to feed
their cattle over the long winter. With a higher water table, many of these fields
became water-logged or were submerged (Massa 1983, pp. 108-125). Continuous
changes in the water level, due to the daily fluctuations in energy production, con-
tinue to erode the river's banks to a much larger degree than has been the case be-
fore dams were built. People living on the river were displaced with them their
life-styles and a part of Finnish tradition. Many ecological processes were dis-
9
Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark are linked by a common electricity network and
market, NordPool, which means that demands for hydroelectricity from the Kemi River
arise not only in Finland, but even, for instance, in Denmark.
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