The Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania presented an estimate of several thousand deaths among the political prisoners used in the project, significantly higher than 656 officially recorded by an official report from 1968. Journalist Anne Applebaum had previously claimed that over 200,000 had died in its construction, as a result of exposure, unsafe equipment, malnutrition, accidents, tuberculosis and other diseases, over-work, etc., while political analyst Vladimir Socor had estimated the number of deaths to be "considerably in excess of 10,000". As such, the project became known as "The Death Canal" ("Canalul Morții"). It has also been called "a cesspool of immense human suffering and mortality".