vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #153 / Social life / Reading article...

Workers at the water plant in Artyom are threatening to strike for eight months of back pay, a move which could cripple Vladivostok’s water supply for weeks, said plant director Sergei Kislitsin.

The strike, however, only masks the larger problem that water reservoirs are at only 10 percent of capacity as winter approaches.

Kislitsin sent warnings and threats to mayor Victor Cherepkov this week, whose Municipal Water and Sewage Agency claims it cannot pay Artyom workers because Vladivostok citizens have only paid for 29 percent of what they’ve consumed this year, current figures indicate.

Regardless of such financial problems, the two basins that provide Vladivostok with water are at the “dead level” — a term used to indicate that reservoirs are only filled to 10 percent of capacity. Stores are thought to be so low because of an unexpectedly dry summer.

But water shortages in the region are a chronic ailment. City officials recognize that more water is consumed in the area than can be currently provided for, but don’t do anything about it, often for lack of funds.

“The water supply problem has been existing for tens of years,” Deputy Mayor Nikolai Markovtsev said. “It should have been solved a long time ago when there was money in the krai.”

Markovtsev said that the city will try to end the crisis this spring by surveying the Pushkinskaya depression, a natural underground reservoir that was discovered 20 years ago but never tapped. If water starts pumping from there to the city, water shortages would be a thing of the past, Markovtsev said. “We’re trying to get to access the depression, and I think that finally once we open it, our problems will be solved,” he said.

Until then, the Krai Emergencies Commission warned that Vladivostok apartments may be reduced to using one tap in the basement, as is now occurring in nearby Bolshoi Kamen.