Series of quakes occur on Russia Pacific coast

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VLADIVOSTOK, February 18 (Itar-Tass) - Russia's Pacific coast has been
rocked by a series of earthquakes on Wednesday. The strongest of them had
the magnitude of 5.1 points. According to the press service of the Far
Eastern regional centre of the RF Emergency Situations Ministry, this
tremor occurred in the Pacific Ocean 256 kilometres southeast of the
Nikolskoye settlement located on the Commander Islands.
On the Kurils tectonic cataclysms occurred southeast of the
uninhabited island Shikotan where the quake magnitude reached 4.5 points.
The epicentre was located 86 kilometres from the island at a depth of 70
kilometres. Another earth tremor with the magnitude of 3.6 points was
registered in the central uninhabited part of the Kuril chain 335
kilometres northeast of the Kurilsk town (Iturup island). The focus of
this quake was located at a depth of 270 kilometres.
None of the quakes was felt in populated localities of the Sakhalin
region and Kamchatka Territory, no casualties, damage have been reported,
tsunami threat was not announced.
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.RF Gidroproyekt Institute signs contract on 2 HPPs in Ecuador.

BOGOTA, February 18 (Itar-Tass) - Russia's company OAO Gidroproyekt
Institute that is part of Engineering Centre UES has signed a contract on
conducting in a consortium with a Mexican and Ecuadorian companies of the
design work for a cascade of 2 hydropower plants - Tortugo and Llurimaguas
on the Guayllabamba River in the Pichincha capital province in Ecuador,
Itar-Tass was told at the Russian embassy in Quito on Thursday.
"It is the first contract concluded by Gidroproyekt in Latin America
in the post-Soviet period," the diplomatic mission stressed. "On the
hydroelectric complexes' construction sites the Russian specialists intend
to take magnetometer measurements, which will be the first application of
this technology in Ecuador and will serve a guarantee of high reliability
of research." The term of the contract is 2 years and its cost is 2
million US dollars.
The participation of the Gidroproyekt Institute in conducting the
feasibility study for the construction of the two hydropower plants
considerably improves chances of Russian enterprises to get contracts on
the supply of Russian power equipment to them, according to the embassy.
The HPP cascade will include two hydroelectric complexes: Tortugo with
the capacity of 230 megawatts and Llurimaguas with the capacity of 140
megawatts.
The Gidroproyekt Institute has worked out projects for 150 HPPs in
Russia to the total capacity of over 50 million kilowatts. Over 20 HPPs
with the design capacity of about 15 million kilowatt have been built and
are being built in 15 countries under the company's projects.
Gidroproyekt (Hydroproject) is a Russian hydrotechnical design firm.
Based in Moscow, it has a number of branches around the country. Its main
activities are design of dams, hydroelectric stations, canals, sluices,
etc. Hydroproject and its predecessor institutions have designed most of
the hydroelectric dams and irrigation and navigation canals that have been
built in the Soviet Union and Russia since the 1930s. They have designed a
number of high-profile projects abroad as well, from India to Egypt to
Canada. However, the main brainchild of the institute and its visionary
founder, Sergey Yakovlevich Zhuk - the rerouting of part of the water flow
of Russia's northern and Siberian rivers to Kazakhstan and Central Asia -
never came to fruition.
Today's Hydroproject traces its history to the design departments of
the Moscow Canal Construction Project (the 1930s), and the
Hydroelectrostroi Trust, which was formed on October 9, 1930, to
coordinate the construction of hydroelectric dams in the USSR during its
First Five-Year Plan. The two organizations, after changing their names a
number of times, were finally merged in 1962. Until 1950, they were within
the ambit of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs; later, under the
Ministry of Energy.
Some of the institute's regional branches, notably the one in Saint
Petersburg (Leningrad), known as Lenhydroproject, have an even longer
history.
Since the 1990s, the institute operates as a subsidiary of Unified
Energy Systems, Russia's national electricity company.
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