Danube-Black Sea Canal
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The Danube-Black Sea Canal is a canal in Romania which runs from Cernavodă on the Danube to Agigea and Năvodari on the Black Sea. It opened in 1984, and the 64km canal reduces the distance by boat from Constanţa to Cernavodă by 400 km, being an important part of the European canal system that links the North Sea to the Black Sea.
The canal took over nine years to construct, 300 million m3 of soil was excavated, by hand, by over 30,000 people. 4.2 million m3 of reinforced concrete was used in the construction.
Although there were plans for building this canal since the 19th century, the construction began only in 1949. It became known as the Death Canal (Canalul Morţii in Romanian) in an earlier attempt to build it when, during the communist purges, some 40,000 people, most of them convicts for political reasons in Romanian forced-labour camps, were worked to death on the project between 1949 and 1953.
The cost of the building of the canal is estimated to be around $2 billion, and was supposed to be recovered in 50 years. However, nowadays it has a yearly profit of only a little over 3 million €.
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