 RUSSELL WORKING A worker shovels out flour for pensioners in an unheated veterans council store in Egersheld. |
Thousands of people are shivering in cold homes in an icy archipelago across the Far East, and the public's patience is boiling over.
About 600 apartment blocks in Vladivostok are still without central heating or are inadequately warmed due to a combination of fuel shortages, delayed maintenance work, and bureaucratic infighting, local media reported. Tens of thousands of people in this Pacific port city of 634,000 are warming themselves with space heaters and by bundling up while indoors.
In the worse homes and offices, sewage freezes in toilets, porcelain cracks and maintenance workers struggle to thaw frozen pipes. The overtaxed electrical system in some apartment blocks is fizzing out due to the overuse of space heaters.
"We all stayed in one room with the space heater, and we all slept together in one bed with the dog," said Olga Zinyakova, a 40-year-old shopkeeper whose heat was only turned on Tuesday. "Our German shepherd was so cold he kept trying to get under the blankets with us."
The situation is similar elsewhere. Anatoly Makhankov, head of the Federation of Trade Unions of Magadanskaya Oblast, said there has been no central heating for weeks in homes in Magadan, about 1,500 kilometers to the north, because the energy company can't afford coal. Schools have been closed and a commission from the Emergency Situations Ministry called the predicament a disaster during a recent visit.
"People are hostages here because they have nowhere to go," Makhankov said.
In the town of Mys Shmidta on the Arctic Sea in the Chukotka autonomous region, 286 people had to be evacuated to an army base Thursday after the explosion of a heating system that serviced 10 apartment blocks. Temperatures are below minus 25 degrees Celsius.
And less than a month after federal officials flew to Petropavlavsk-Kamchatsky on the Kamchatka Peninsula to deal with an emergency fuel shortage, the northeastern seaport of 265,000 is again running short of fuel. Homes have had no electricity for three days and their heat has been reduced to save energy, said Vera Vlasova, spokeswoman for the Kamchatskaya Oblast Press Center. Despite a wealth of natural gas and geothermal reserves, Kamchatka runs its power plants and heats its homes with oil imported by tanker.
Some small villages have been hit even harder. There is no heat in Olenevod, a collective farm village of about 1,000 people in Primorye, the finger of Russia flanked by China, North Korea and the Sea of Japan. Most villagers there once raised deer but are now unemployed.
Temperatures that have fallen to minus 22 C have mostly kept irate citizens indoors. But last week in Vladivostok, anger boiled over when at least 7,000 people in 29 apartment blocks were left without heat because of a squabble between the city and the port, which share responsibility for the boilers heating the homes. Hundreds of protesters blocked a bridge in the Egersheld suburb, and when a television crew tried to move its Volga through the crowd, Alexander Shishov, 68, started beating the vehicle with his cane.
"I can barely stand on my leg, and he tried to push me with his car," Shishov explained.
The mob attacked the Volga, tore off its grille, and nearly succeeded in flipping the car over before police intervened.
One motorist in a foreign sports car set his dog on the protesters, after which some of the mob grabbed the man and threw him on the hood of his car, news reports said. A police squadron rescued the driver.
 RUSSELL WORKING Maintenance workers thaw pipes in Vladivostok apartment block with a blowtorch. |
Port officials scurried to return heat to most apartments left without heat, but others remained in the cold. The port veterans lined up inside one building to buy discounted herring, sugar and flour at a store. Workers bundled in scarves and fur hats shoveled bags full of flour for the elderly, bulky in their multiple sweaters and coats.
Raisa Stratova, an accountant, huddled in an office decorated with her boss's posters of a woman in a thong washing a red Mustang with a sponge. An electric heater buzzed underfoot, but she couldn't get warm. "We can't turn on more because there will be blackouts," she said.
Upstairs, Tatyana Kasianova, 38, said her 8-year-old boy has a cough and she doesn't know how to treat him in a cold apartment. The heat never rises above 7 C. The dormitory-style apartment has neither toilet nor bath, and the common shower room down the hall is unheated.
"We keep the space heaters on in the bedroom all night, although we are afraid of fires," she said.
Elsewhere in the building, workers removed a section of floor and began thawing frozen pipes with a blowtorch. Sergei Besprozvanny, a plumber with a household maintenance company, said the city and the port had squabbled for too long over repairs, and now pipes have frozen in exterior hallways and stairwells.
"It's the end of the 20th century, and people are flying to outer space, and we are thawing pipes with a blowtorch," he said.
Nonna Chernyakova contributed to this report.
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