Pechora River

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Pechora River has many tributaries. In the north are the Kara Strait, Kara Sea and Novaya Zemlya, in the east the Ural Mountains.

For the town in Russia, see Pechora.

Pechora (Russian: Печо́ра; Komi: Печӧра; Nenets: Санэроˮ яха) is a major river in European Russia (Komi Republic and Nenets Autonomous Okrug). It is 1,809 km long.

The river rises in the Ural Mountains in the south-eastern corner of the Komi Republic, and flows north or north-west through Yaksha, Ust-Ilych, Troitsko-Pechorsk, Vuktyl, Pechora, and Naryan-Mar before entering the Pechora Bay inlet of the Pechora Sea at Nosovaya. The headwaters of the Pechora and its tributary the Ilych are a protected natural area, the Pechora-Ilych Nature Reserve.

Pechora River is still one of the most polluted rivers in Europe.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Connections with the Kama

Before the arrival of the railroad to the Pechora, an important way of travel to the region was via a portage road, from Cherdyn in the Kama River basin to Yaksha on the Pechora.

A project for a Pechora-Kama Canal along the same general route was widely discussed in the 1960s through 1980s, this time not as much for transportation, but for the diversion of some of the water of the Pechora to the Kama, as part of a grand Northern river reversal scheme. However, no construction work was carried out on the route of the proposed canal, other than a triple nuclear explosion in 1971, which excavated a crater over 600 m long.