Vietas

Vietas’ power plant is located in the Stora Sjöfallet nature reserve, which has been used by hunters since the Stone Age. People came here for the good fishing and for the wild reindeer. There are remnants of Sami culture in the shape of a large number of hearths and different types of storage pits in the area. There is also an older settlement that was used until the 1960s. In the 19th century, interest in ‘untouched’ nature grew among the middle class, and early tourism got started in the area.

Facility construction started in 1965, and Vietas’ power plant was completed in 1972. The power plant uses a head of 83 metres, and has been expanded for a water discharge of 530 m3/s. Electrical output, across two power generation units, is 306 MW.

Vietas is the power plant that is located ten kilometres downstream from Suorva. The power plant could just as well have been called Stora Sjöfallet, but Vattenfall chose the name Vietas to avoid difficult conversations, as Stora Sjöfallet is mostly associated with the national park and great natural values.

Vietas gets its power from two directions; through a seven-kilometre long rock tunnel from the Suorva reservoir, and a five-kilometre long tunnel from the Sitasjaure reservoir. When the power plant was built, new challenges were faced, as no previous power plant using power from two different reservoirs had ever been built. A further problem was that the Suorva tunnel consisted of rockburst rock, which meant that the tunnel could sometimes auto-explode.

In April 1971, Vietas became famous throughout Sweden, as the whole wage float of 540,000 SEK was stolen. The thieves were cunning, as they got into the room where the safe was, hit a nail through the floor to then crawl under the building and saw through the floor using the nail for guidance. Once they had sawed through the floor, they used a blowtorch to open the bottom of the safe, emptied the contents, and disappeared from the site. The theft wasn’t discovered until the thieves had a head start of a few hours. They’ve kept it to this day, as the heist is now filed under cold, unsolved cases with the police.

At most, 600 people worked at the Vietas construction site. The large workplace had three residential areas. At Suorva, 120 workers could be housed in previously erected buildings. The main village was at Stora Sjöfallet with 16 family homes, a canteen with space for 200 people, and various buildings that could house some 70 office staff, as well as a bachelors’ facility that could house a few hundred men. The third area was located at the Sitasjaure dam. It had a bachelors’ facility for around 100 people.

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