A week for water: 5 Voronezh

The city of Voronezh is divided into two by its river of the same name.  Although a human settlement had been in existence there for quite some time, when Peter the Great built a dockyard there it developed rapidly into a sizeable town.  The Russian fleet was born there.  In fact at one point it was the largest city in southern Russia.

In 1933 Andrei Platanov said that the once strong and abundant river was decrepit and exhausted, thanks to man's interference.  It remains very polluted but as part of a program to protect the natural environment, a steel works has stopped dumping waste water into the river, and in the Lipetsk region, hundreds of thousands of young fish have been released to restock and repopulate the river.