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__NOTOC__ Mattmark dam is a
reservoir A reservoir (; ) is an enlarged lake behind a dam, usually built to water storage, store fresh water, often doubling for hydroelectric power generation. Reservoirs are created by controlling a watercourse that drains an existing body of wa ...
in the Saas Valley of the Canton of
Valais Valais ( , ; ), more formally, the Canton of Valais or Wallis, is one of the cantons of Switzerland, 26 cantons forming the Switzerland, Swiss Confederation. It is composed of thirteen districts and its capital and largest city is Sion, Switzer ...
,
Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
. The Mattmark dam was built from 1960 to 1965. The
lake A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from ...
's surface area is . The lake lies at a height of 2,197 metres above sea level, between the massifs of the Rimpfischhorn and Stellihorn. The highest peak visible from the lake is the Strahlhorn (4,190 m).


Engineering and dimensions

Mattmark is the largest rock-fill/earth dam in Europe: a 120 m-high embankment 780 m long that impounds up to 100 million cubic metres of water behind a 373 m-wide crest. Construction began in 1958 and the first full impoundment was reached in 1969, two years after commissioning. The reservoir's natural catchment of 37 km2 is augmented by diversion tunnels that tap several glacial side-valleys, so that almost half of the 88 km2 total intake area is glacier-covered.


Power generation

The dam forms the upper basin of Kraftwerke Mattmark AG's storage scheme. Water descends 1,200 m through pressure tunnels to underground
turbine A turbine ( or ) (from the Greek , ''tyrbē'', or Latin ''turbo'', meaning vortex) is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work. The work produced can be used for generating electrical ...
s at Zermeiggern and Stalden, giving the plant a combined installed capacity of about 130  MW. Annual production averages roughly 625  GWh, enough to power more than 140,000 Swiss households. Shareholders include Axpo (38.9 %), Centralschweizerische Kraftwerke (CKW), (27.8 %) and BKW Energie (11.1 %), with the remaining equity held by the municipalities of Sion and Siders.


Mattmark disaster

On 30 August 1965, 88 construction workers, 56 of them of Italian nationality, were buried under 2,000,000 m³ of ice and debris by a glacier collapse of the Allalin glacier. The risk involved in constructing the accommodation barracks directly below the glacier tongue, which eventually broke off, was not taken into account. No other reservoir in Switzerland claimed so many victims during construction. Seven years after the accident, the Valais judiciary acquitted all 17 defendants, including engineers and managers of Elektrowatt and officials of the Swiss Accident Insurance Fund. In 2005, journalist Kurt Marti revealed that those responsible for the construction site knew about the dangers of the Allalin glacier and that the court ignored all incriminating facts in its decision.


See also

* List of lakes of Switzerland *
List of mountain lakes of Switzerland This is a list of high-altitude lakes of Switzerland. It includes all significant lakes located either entirely or partly in Switzerland, both natural and artificial, with an area of at least 4 ha (9.9 acres) and a location at over above sea l ...


References


External links


Kraftwerke Mattmark


* {{Authority control Lakes of Valais Reservoirs in Switzerland