Vajont

The Vajont is a 34 km long torrent in the Northern Italian Province of Pordenone flowing from Friuli-Venezia Giulia (western Friuli) to eastern Veneto. The stream has carved a narrow gorge over time, known as Vajont valley or Valle del Vajont. Etymology The term vajont or in dialect, Vajo, appears in documents from 1300, with different spellings: "Vaiote", "Vaion" and "Vajont". It stems from the Latin word "vallis", which means valley. If it is accentuated as "Vallion", it becomes Vajon, "Walloon" or great valley; the final "t" only serves to stress the word. Similar terms can be found in other valleys, such as in the Vicenza Vajo. Geography The Vajont originates from a source located in Friuli, in the homonymous Vajont valley, a gorge, between the Forcella col de Pin and the Val Mesaz at about 1900 m above sea level in the Province of Pordenone. It flows in a direction from West to East. At the base of Mount Toc it mounds into the Piave river, just at the height of the municipality of Longarone, almost directly below the Vajont dam, in the province of Belluno. On the right side of the valley are the villages of Erto and Casso (province of Pordenone), connected by the SS 251 with Longarone, in the valley of the Piave, and with Maniago, along the upper valley of the Cellina river. Vajont dam and Monte Toc landslide In the 1920s, Italian Carlo Semenza (engineer) first conceived the Vajont dam; In the 1930s the Società Adriatica di Elettricità SADE undertook the Vajont dam also known as the "Great Vajont" project, as the dam was set to become the highest in the world. Construction of the dam began in the summer of 1956 and reservoir filled in 1960. Meanwhile, on March 22, 1959, an accident at the Lago di Pontesei occurred, where a landslide of 3 million cubic meters of rock slipped into the lake, overwhelming a worker, whose body was never found; it was feared that something like this could happen in Vajont.