Spirit of Thaechon :: Weekly Blitz

During his inspection in January 2007 of the newly built Thaechon Youth Power Station No. 4 the leader Kim Jong Il praised the young builders and the people of North Phyongan Province for erecting a great structure by mobilizing their own efforts and technology and instructed that the spirit they had displayed in the construction should be emulated by the entire nation. Then he did credit to the local people by calling their spirit of Thaechon.

The construction of the Thaechon Power Station had been a grand nature harnessing project planned and promoted by President Kim Il Sung in his lifetime. At the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Sixth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea held in October 1981, Kim Il Sung stressed the need to build a large-scale hydropower station on the Taeryong River in the province in order to relieve the strain on electricity, solve the problem of irrigation water in the west coast areas and hand down to posterity a better land to live in. The President also fixed the sites for the construction of the power station.

Then the project started. Only a few years after ground breaking, the builders cut a waterway tunnel to divert the course of the Chungman River that had been flowing to Jagang Province and completed the first-stage construction of both the Songwon and Thaechon dams to check the stream of the Taeryong River, thus building and putting into operation Thaechon power stations Nos. 1 and 2 in August 1988. In October 2000 the project to enlarge the Thaechon dam and the construction of Thaechon Power Station No. 5 were completed. In April 2002 there appeared Thaechon Youth Power Station No. 3 and later in October 2006 Thaechon Youth Power Station No. 4. The construction of Thaechon Youth Power Station No. 4 started in May 2002. It required damming the wider section of the Taeryong River, and the amount of earth to be dug out was tremendous because of the topographical peculiarities. Lots of young people came to work for the construction. They included machine operators, needle workers and those fresh out of secondary school. Most of them were strange to the construction of a hydropower station. They started the project with digging for laying the foundation of the dam. The project was a fight with the fierce nature and water. Despite severe cold, the builders threw themselves in the river and built the cofferdam in water while pushing ahead with digging and tamping for the foundation of the dam without letup.

Their life, however, was optimistic. Busy as they were with work day and night, they managed to make time to sing and dance. To express their feeling they engraved on the dam the slogan "Let us go the thorny path cheerfully!" None of them was a poet or writer, but the thrilling reality turned all of them into poets or writers. The poems they recited during a break or an entertainment party number over 2 000, over 100 of which they compiled into a collection of poems titled Taeryong River Tells. Quite impressive are their poems representative of their optimistic life such as Bedrock and Youth, Place for Youth to Stand and I Love the Girl.

The spirit and way of work the young builders created in the construction of the power station greatly encouraged all the people of the country in the endeavour to build a prosperous and powerful socialist nation.

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