vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #151 / Special reports / Reading article...

Radioactive waste may be causing illness and deformities, but residents of Baley feel there is no escape.

• Baley is a town of 25,000 in the Chita region 200 km north of China.
  
• The Soviet Union used thorium and uranium mined at the top-secret Enterprise 1084 to make its first atomic bomb.
  
• Radioactive tailings were used as construction materials in homes, nurseries, schools and the hospital.
  
• 95 percent of Baley’s children are “mentally deficient.”

Doctors in Baley, a small gold mining town in the Far Eastern region of Chita, had always puzzled over the high incidence of babies born with missing limbs, bald children and adults with huge heads.

They guessed such deformities were related to the nameless mine on the outskirts of Baley, where potatoes grew the length of cucumbers. But as Government Enterprise 1084 was top secret, they could only discuss their surmises in private.

In 1992, the Russian government disclosed the ghastly facts behind the numbers. The products 17 and 18 Baley had mined until the mid-1970s had been thorium and uranium, and Government Enterprise 1084 had provided material for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb.

Previously famed as the birthplace of the Mongolian warrior, Baley is better known regionally for being worse than Chernobyl. But while environmentalists are calling for the complete relocation of the town’s 25,000 citizens, regional and local officials say there is no money, not even to seal the mines.

No one in Baley knew the nature of operation 1084, say locals. Cattle grazed on the grass covering the lethal uranium tailings, and a car repair shop was housed in a former thorium storage facility. But in the worst example of Moscow’s neglect for Baley, the attractive but highly radioactive white sand was taken from uranium pits to build homes, nurseries, schools and the hospital.

As a result, some people live in homes measuring 600 micro roentgens per hour (mcr/h), 10 times the level regarded as safe in Russia. Until recently, their children staged plays in the Palace of Culture, emitting 2,500 mcr/h, the same level as cars leaving the Chernobyl region after the nuclear disaster.

Baley’s chief physician saw his patients in a room measuring 800 mcr/h.

“Just visit the children’s ward, and you will see the effect such levels have on people’s health,” said Valentina Dudareva, pediatrician at Baley hospital. “We have many cases of babies born with mutations: six fingers and six toes, children with hare lips, ‘wolves’ mouths,’ back deformities and huge heads.

Often they have entire limbs missing.”

More than 95 percent of the children in Baley are “mentally deficient,” according to the East Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Rates of stillbirths are five times the Russian average, child mortality is 2.5 times higher, miscarriages and congenital defects in newborns 1.4 times higher, Down syndrome four times higher.

“I can say I’m healthy, but everyone else in my family has been affected by radiation, and my grandson is an invalid,” said Yevgeny Suriva, 45, who lived in a flat measuring 600 mcr/h.

“My youngest daughter couldn’t speak until she was 5. She can’t hear well, she has heart disease and a growth on her cheek. We took her to a doctor in Krasnoyarsk. They measured her hair. It was radioactive. The doctor told us to go back where we had come from.”

The Surivas are lucky to have been moved. When the catastrophe came to light, the town’s gold mining company, Baleyzoloto, started finding people new houses and tearing down radioactive plaster. But now the Baleyzoloto boss is on the run, facing charges of corruption, and the company is at a standstill. The program has stopped.

On the 5th of December Street, residents are stranded in blocks of flats measuring between 400 and 500 mcr/h. Valery Shalopva, a senior engineer, said he was promised a change of address and compensation, but they never materialized.

"My son who is only 12 has had two operations on his kidneys; my wife has blood pressure disease,” he said. “But where can we go? We are dying, but it is impossible for us to leave.”

His neighbor, Lyubov Litlinsa, says 30 people in the block of 14 flats have died since 1990. The latest was a child who developed cancer at five months.

The hospital can do little for these people. The medicine cupboards of Chief Doctor Vladimir Catsik are empty, and he has no diagnostic equipment. Half of his staff were on hunger strike in protest at not having been paid for 10 months, and the hospital is barely heated.

“We mined 400 tones of gold for this government, but now nobody takes care of our people,” said Catsik. “We are no longer necessary. We sit on gold, yet people don’t have enough to eat.”

Life in Baley was once very different. People recall holidays in Cuba, shops where you could buy everything, salaries 30 percent higher than average and they received a 30 percent premium on their salaries because they lived in the far flung “northern territories.”

Today, come dusk, children wander Baley’s streets knocking on doors begging for bread. At 11:30 p.m., Natasha, 7, and her brother Pyotr, 5, had had nothing to eat all day. Their mother had given Pyotr a fabric handbag in which to collect bread from friends and bring it back for the family. Natasha stopped going to school last winter, as she didn’t have boots to protect against the weather that drops to -40 centigrade. Their father is an engineer and their mother a school administrator.

For many who haven’t seen pay in over a year, concern about radiation levels has become secondary to finding enough to eat.

The only glimmer of hope is an Australian gold mining company, Balgold, which plans to transform the abandoned Baleyzoloto pits into world class mines using new technology. Any fears the company will further pollute the environment are far outweighed by the jobs and infrastructure improvements Balgold promises. The Australians have also undertaken to seal the uranium mines with waste rock from gold production.

But the gold project is also one reason regional officials do nothing about the uranium levels. “Negative publicity about radioactive contamination is bad for the project,” said Dmitry Selehim, a Chita regional duma deputy.

One woman, however, refuses to keep silent. Dudareva has set up the town’s first-ever grassroots pressure group called For the Life of Baley. The aim is to bring aid and attention to Baley.

“We need to get our government to see how desperate the situation is here,” she said. “If nothing is done soon, the people of Baley are going to slowly die out.”