PhilPaine.com

Giant hydro-elec­tric dams are not exact­ly a pop­u­lar sub­ject, these days, but, eco­log­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions aside, the build­ing of Man­ic 5 cer­tainly pro­vides a heavy dose of awe and romance. Few tourists take the trou­ble to jour­ney into the remote dis­trict in North­ern Que­bec where this huge struc­ture is. It’s not just the gigan­tic sta­tis­tics (even the 735,000-volt trans­mis­sion lines were an engi­neer­ing achieve­ment on an unprece­dented scale), but the human dra­ma of its con­struc­tion. The authors cap­ture this in both prose and about a hun­dred beau­ti­ful draw­ings. Lili Réthi, who looked some­thing like Miss Marple, was one of the great­est archi­tec­tural and engi­neer­ing artists, and she died short­ly after com­plet­ing the Man­ic 5 draw­ings. Her work, which is of great artis­tic val­ue in my view, is known only to archi­tects and engineers.

The reser­voir cre­ated by Man­ic 5 is even more inter­est­ing than the dam. Any­one who has spent any time in Earth orbit is quite famil­iar with it, since it stands out like a bull’s‑eye, seen from space. The project flood­ed the impact crater cre­ated by a five km wide aster­oid that struck Que­bec towards the end of the Tri­as­sic. The Man­i­coua­gan lake acts as a giant hydraulic bat­tery for Hydro-Que­bec. In the peak peri­od of the win­ter cold, the tur­bines are run all the time at peak load to meet the mas­sive elec­tri­cal heat­ing needs of the province. Dur­ing the sum­mer, the sur­plus is sold to the New Eng­land grid. The island inside the lake is larg­er than Rhode Island. Some of the lakes with­in the island with­in the lake have large islands in them. As far as I know, there are no inhabitants.