January 20, 2004
Calarasi
I went to Calarasi today.
Calarasi -- it's pronounced kuller-osh, don't ask -- is the poorest city in Romania. Here's what the Lonely Planet has to say about it:
"The surreal entry by road from the northwest beneath an ungainly 'bridge' of rusting conveyor belts forming an intricate maze to the city's steel works, says it all about this city. Largely industrial, the town offers absolutely no reason to come here except to catch the next ferry out -- across the Danube to Ostrov, from where you can cross into Silistra in Bulgaria."
This is perhaps a bit unkind. There are at least two reasons to visit Calarasi.
One is the aforementioned steel works. This is something that is really, truly amazing. It's an enormous industrial complex, covering many hundreds of acres. There are great vast factory buildings with thousands of windows; miles and miles of enormous metal pipes; huge conveyor belts, big enough to drive a truck along, hanging suspended dozens of meters in the air. Off to one side is a dock -- the quay is 600 meters long -- designed especially for the steel works; cranes dangle over a canal dug especially for the factory, reaching several kilometers to the main branch of the Danube. Sitting in the middle of it all is the cooling tower of a power plant -- not nuclear, I don't think, but big as hell anyhow.
And, holy weeping scrod, it's all dead dead dead. The factory windows are broken and the cold January wind blows snow through them. The special canal is covered with an unbroken scrim of ice. The immense pipes are brown with rust and have collapsed in several places. Pieces of the conveyor belts have snapped and are hanging off. It looks like the set of a movie -- a bad, but extremely expensive movie -- about a post-apocalyptic future inhabited only by vampires and mutants.
I'm not usually one to wax sentimental over the lost achievements of communism, but the sheer boggling scope of the waste here is truly jaw-droppingly eye-poppingly vast. It's hard to meaningfully estimate costs under a Communist system, but you can try to get a handle on it by looking at production. In the years of its full operation, from 1981 to 1992, Calarasi produced about seven million tons of steel. Trying to work backwards from that, I get a figure of about $1.2 billion US dollars. That seems high, but not grossly so. I'd believe half a billion.
So: half a billion dollars, slowly crumbling into rust flakes and blowing away into the greay January sky. That's worth going out of your way for, I'd say. In fact, if I ever go back to Calarasi, I'll leave early so that I have time to stop, get out, and walk around a bit.
(Surrealist bonus points: the road from Bucharest to Calarasi goes right through the complex, but you can see that it didn't always; it used to swing wide around. The complex was once surrounded by a high wall, and the road dead-ended at a large gate with a guard post. The complex was a sensitive State enterprise, and only employees and carefully screened visitors were allowed in. Today the gate has been removed and the road blasts right on through.)
Asking about the complex in Calarasi got contradictory responses, with comprehension made more difficult by the fact that no one in Calarasi speaks much English. A couple of people claimed that there was still some sort of life going on inside the complex. Could be -- it's big enough that you could hide a few hundred people, no problem. But it's clearly operating at some tiny fraction of its old capacity, and most of its physical plant is shot beyond hope of repair.
The other reason to visit Calarasi? The Museum of the Lower Danube. No, I haven't been there -- didn't have time. But, come on. The Museum of the _Lower Danube_. It doesn't even have a web page, that's how cool it is. If I get back to Calarasi, for sure that's the other thing I won't miss.
Maybe more about Calarasi in a bit -- but it may have to wait a day or two; it's off to Craiova tomorrow, weather permitting.
Posted by douglas at January 20, 2004 11:06 PMGeez, Doug. Sounds eerily familiar to me. Dead and/or dying steel mills aren't anything new here in the glorious Rust Belt. I could probably count the number of steel mills still operating within a hundred miles of here on one hand, maybe two with fingers left over. When I was your kids' age there seemed to be dozens, and my parents had friends or relatives working in many of them! Ever hear Bruce Springsteen's song "Youngstown"? I had two uncles who worked there.
OK, ours (Weirton Steel) ain't dead yet, but they're now bankrupt, laid off 800 more guys over the weekend, and are down to about a fourth of the number of employees they had 25 years ago. The site of Homestead's mill -- where the famous 1894 strike occurred, and where my grandfather used to work -- is now a water park and shopping mall! The old J&L mill site in Pittsburgh, which was the last steel mill actually in the Steel City, is now an athletic training center for the Pittsburgh Steelers (pro) and Panthers (university) football teams.
I don't suppose Calarasi can do any of that, though.
Hope you get to their museum someday. Sounds like it may be the one bright spot in their local economy. At least until they're ready for water parks and malls.
Posted by: Lois Fundis at January 21, 2004 01:11 AMThe Calarasi county is also famous for two more things: farming and hunting.
There are two important meat producers in the area: poultry - Avicola Calarasi and pig - Comsuin Ulmeni. The poultry producer is not that big, since it is just a spin-off of a former communist "Avicola" poultry producer from the area. On the other hand the pork meat producer was one of the biggest Romanian producers until 1998 when a terrible disease forced them to reduce their live stocks and production capacity to 20-25%. (The factory capacity is one of the largest from the ones from Europe's South-East). Things changed in 2001, they got over it, got some compensations from the governemnt and also the pork meat price started to pick up; as such, Comsuin started talks with several investors - the State and the UK-based PIC among the most important. Presently, to my knowledge, their shareholders are still looking for buyers. :)
The second thing worth knowing aboput the Calarasi area is the hunting places. It is quite a popular place especially among foreigners, several celebrities went there in the last decade.
As Doug noticed, it is quite a poor area, back at the beginning of last century people used to live out of farming (corn and wheat), then the communists built the steel factory also having in mind the proximity of Danube. Nowadays there's nothing but ruins, with Taracila the most important local personality - he used to be the Internal Affairs Minister in the 90s and I think he still is a Parliament member from PSD, the governemnt party.
Posted by: dragos at January 21, 2004 12:17 PMBe carefull.. the weather forecast is very bad for the next days.
Big snow is coming!!
Take care!
Anca & Misha
Posted by: Anca & Misha at January 21, 2004 03:04 PMDoug,
good talking to you for a half second at Pam's a few weeks ago. no idea why i googled your name. but glad i did. cute baby. and what are the two reasons to visit calarasi?
happy winter.
cheers from balmy rochester, new york,
Stacey
Lois: one problem here is that dead assets don't get recycled very quickly. The bankruptcy system isn't working so well, and the state is still hoping that some outside investor may try to redeem the complex.
So meanwhile it continues to slowly rust and collapse -- no water parks or athletic training centers any time soon in Calarasi. And I don't think there are too many abandoned US steel mills of that size, though I could certainly be wrong.
Dragos: thanks for the interesting information! Have you been to Calarasi, or are you just a keen observer?
Doug M.
Posted by: Douglas at January 23, 2004 11:05 PMActually, the waste isn't now when it's rusting and dying. The waste was when it produced a half billion in steel out of three quarters of a billion in inputs. Those aren't real numbers but the waste was real.
Why would anybody want to restart that?
Posted by: TM Lutas at February 10, 2004 10:19 AMHello Doug,
It seems to me that there are a number of inaccuracies in your article. Having spent a total of over nine months, over the last ten years, living in Calarasi, while working as a volunteer building and rebuilding several orphanages in the city and surrounding area.
The first being the production of steel from the factory. The amount of new steel produced was nothing. I have a close friend who worked as a testing engineer at the factory for a number of years. According to him, the factory did produce from scrap, some railroad steel rails, however the quality was so poor that no one would buy it. Now the highest and best use of the factory seems to be it's removal. The tearing down process has frankly generated a number of "Midnight Steel Sales" businesses. While this might not seem very honest. The suffering that these people experienced. In my book, allows for some looking the otherway
I must strongly disagree with your statement that "no one in Calarasi speaks much english". About 20% of the residents of Calarasi speak and write very fluent english. Another 30% speaks enough english that communication is easily possible with some pointing and sign language. When I visit, I do not bother to carry a translation book.
Also, It is amazing the number of cottage industries that have taken root in the last 10 years in Calarasi. Be it private taxi(s), boat builders, bars, restaurants, welding shops and outdoor patio furniture production, etc, etc, etc.
Besides the steel mill and the museum, you might ask about seeing the 2000 year old Roman Fort ruins on the Danuabe. It is a great adventure.
Lastly, in my opinion, the most important attraction of Calarasi is the people. I have found them to be honest, caring, loyal and most pleasant to be around.
If you get the chance, go back to Calasari and spend some time getting to know the people. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Kindest Regards, Benjamin J. "Joe" Browning
This post was based on a one-day visit, so I make no claims that it's accurate in every respect. But we try to keep our posts as factually correct as possible.
The steel issue -- I'm not sure what you think I said here. I wrote that it used to produce 7 million tons of steel, back in the 1980s under Communism. But today it produces nothing. Are we in disagreement?
English -- well, you know better than I. But in a long day in Calarasi, meeting dozens of people, I met perhaps three who spoke enough English to have a basic conversation. "Nobody seems to speak much English" might be an exaggeration, but on the other hand I definitely did not see that 20% of the population was speaking English "fluently".
Possibly we're moving in different circles? I was there to meet businessmen from the local small and medium-sized enterprises, officials from the Mayor's office and the one-stop shop, and the staff of the Chamber of Commerce. Maybe this group wasn't representative. Based on one day there, I can't say.
The Roman fort -- I'd have loved to see it, but I had no idea it existed. Like the Museum of the Danube, it doesn't seem to have an obvious web presence, and there are no signs or markers for the casual visitor.
As to the "might be pleasantly surprised" -- you seem to have the idea that I was sneering at Calarasi. Far from it. I liked the people just fine. As individuals, they were the friendliest and most helpful that we've yet met in our travels around Romania. If I didn't blog about that, it's because (1) some of the individuals were helpful to the point where they might have gotten in trouble -- like the woman at a government office who let us into the back room and who spoke freely about the problems with her agency; and (2) the post was pretty long already.
Also, I do have to say that while most people were very nice, there were a couple of exceptions. The Deputy Mayor who was falling-down drunk at 10:30 in the morning was merely annoying. The head of the local SME organization, though, seemed to think we were there to bring him business, or at least bribes. He got very annoyed when we didn't return the "favor" that he'd done us by bringing some of his members to meet us. Some time later, he telephoned my secretary to scream at her for our "ingratitude". So, some good, some not so good.
(I considered posting about that too, but decided against it -- Calarasi has enough problems.)
We went back a couple of months ago, BTW, on the way back from Bulgaria -- took the ferry across from Silistra.
Everyone on the ferry was very pleasant and friendly. But nobody spoke a word of English.
cheers,
Doug M.
I live in Pittsburgh, and as all the mills here are bascially gone, I'd love to photograph an old one. I was in Romania last summer...is there still much left of the old mill? Or has it been torn to pieces to sell the scrap?
Posted by: James at July 21, 2004 09:03 PM