The Mighty Amur River

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Entry posted by PlanetOfHats · January 9, 2023

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The city of Bolliton grew up on the shore of the Amur River. It sits at the head of a series of anabranches in the river, flowing in from the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers westward from the city proper. The river continues on north-northeast to flow into the Pacific, hundreds of kilometres downstream. While the largest port city in Beringia is no longer on the river - it's southward, on Golden Horn Bay - the river is still a vital waterway and a gateway to some of the best growing land in the country.

The Port of Bolliton lies just north of the downtown, where the river widens to fork into the surrounding anabranches. At one point, this area was a major transfer station for grain and rice to be shipped out of Beringia. These days the port is a major industrial export site, with a number of major employers sited in the port lands. The borough of New Amurside has grown up overlooking it.

The borough is "New Amurside" because of the Amurside Disaster of 1922. The borough and port were devastated that year when a tanker full of agricultural fertilizer detonated, leveling much of the region. The port was rebuilt rapidly, but the Disaster is memorialized in the city's history, nowhere more explicitly than here at the 1922 Memorial Plaza.

In game terms, the city tile corrupted and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Whoops.

Today, Nepac Steel is probably the largest industrial employer in the Port of Bolliton. Complaints about pollution are predictably rampant.

Not all is work. Closer to downtown, Boli Beach remains a stretch of waterfront not surrendered to shorewall-type development. It's one of a couple of urban beaches open to anyone. To the south, the beach is overlooked by the PNEBank Centre, a major arena that is home to the Bolliton Tigers of the Pacific Hockey League and the Bolliton Rivermen of the Beringia Basketball Association. Northbound is the portal to one of two tunnels under the Amur, connecting to recently-developed boroughs built on sedimentary islands in the middle of the Amur.

The tunnel comes out here. Building bridges was considered, but the city balked at wielding eminent domain against the amount of land that'd be needed for ramps to get the bridges high enough for freighters to pass beneath. While the largest ships stop north from here, at the seaport, others continue downriver a ways.

A more recent addition to the waterfront: The Bolliton Star ferris wheel. It's a great ride if what you like is a beautiful view of the waterfront and the city skyline.