vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #160 / Special reports / Reading article...

A squabble between the Mayor’s Office and a heating company have left 1,500 people stuck in apartments without heat. And the winter is still young.

A long way out of town out by the last bus stop on the Egersheld peninsula, a freezing wind blows across a landscape so barren that it seems like an outpost of a remote northern region.

On this final stretch of Krygina Street, directly across from the bus stop, the heat still hasn’t been turned on for six apartment buildings, with more than 1,500 residents in them. While the rest of the city got its heat in October, residents on Krygina don’t know when their heating season will begin.

“The mayor promised us on Dec. 26 that we’d have heat in 10 days,” says Sergei Leontiev, a sailor who had to leave his job temporarily to maintain his apartment.

“They keep promising, but nothing happens.”

Meanwhile, the Egersheld residents deal with the jarring cold. The six apartment buildingss are scattered along a small hill overlooking the frozen Zolotoi Rog Bay, where ice-breakers sit, waiting for cargo ships to follow in their wake. Outside one older building – one of the Khrushchevki quickly built late in the fifties – kids are giggling in a doorway, and their mother, three stories above, demands that they come inside.

Nearby, on the steps of a 14-story building that looms over the rest, two women stand talking. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them.

There’s nothing here that would indicate these people are living in homes where the temperature drops below zero when they turn off their electric heaters.

Pensioner Praskovia Tanina is cooking a meal in her apartment, happy for the stove’s warmth. But as the kitchen heats up, wallpaper again begins to peel off. “The walls are frozen through,” Tanina says. “When I cook, they thaw up and streams of water run down, turning them green.”

In the living room, a knee-high kerosene heater looms in the center. Tanina hasn’t turned it on because the fumes it produces give her severe headaches.

Before Tanina’s daughter bought her the heater, the apartment was cold enough to see her own breath. At night she bundled her 1-year-old granddaughter into pants and sweaters. Her food became inedible.

“Our potatoes froze. What temperature is it in here when your potatoes actually freeze?”

In apartment 84, Maria Rozenberg keeps warm with four electric space heaters she leaves on all day long. When she realized the wiring in the house wasn’t strong enough to support such use, she installed larger cable, though she still worries about the fire hazard. She estimates that she will pay more than $100 this month in electricity bills, compared to $20 in a typical winter month.

Rozenberg’s walls are also freezing, and she aims her space heaters at them to keep the wall paper from peeling off.

But her biggest problem right now is the water.

The water pipes running to these six apartments froze a long time ago, and the supply was eventually turned off. When residents on the floors above Rozenberg’s apartment pour their water down the drain, it accumulates in the pipes, and floods the lower levels.

“I plugged up the [water] pipe myself because of this flooding,” she says. “Now that the walls are damp and the paint is coming off, we’ll have to renovate everything.”

Two heaters in her kitchen are on the floor, drying up any remaining wetness. By now the room is unbearably hot and a rank smell emanates from a moldy corner near the sink, where the floor tiling is coming off.

The water problem, most residents agree, is far worse than the cold. One doctor here, Natalya Chudinova, said that she’d adapted to the chill and conserves heat by sealing off the living room of her three-room apartment. She shrugged when she opened the doors to the living room – fully a third of her apartment’s space – where there was no difference between inside and outside temperature.

Frozen pipes, on the other hand, make her afraid to leave the apartment. She doesn’t want to miss the water truck when it rolls in, though it hasn’t shown up for two days. She also fears that when she returns, her apartment will have flooded.

Chudinova said she still receives heating bills from the mayor’s office.

Others are driven to exasperation by the situation. Residents in Krygina 82 tried to unfreeze their pipes with welding torches, and burned down two apartments on the first floor. The apartment entrance is charred, and outside piles of wood, furniture, and melted objects freeze in the morning frost.

At Rozenberg’s 14-story apartment building, the first few flights of stairs in the dark hallway are covered in ice. The lift here doesn’t work, and residents must carry jugs up after the water truck arrives.

Outside, a local entrepreneur has posted a sign offering to carry water jugs up the stairs for two hours every day. He’s charging 10 to 20 rubles, depending on weight.

“All in all I think this is all a terrible mockery of people here,” Rozenberg says.

Krygina residents are caught in a squabble between the mayor’s office and AESKO, a local company that provides heat to these homes. The mayor’s office accuses AESKO of manipulation, while AESKO officials believe the mayor’s office is breaking the law. The two refuse to sign a contract.

“In September we looked at various options with AESKO,” said Valery Chervony, acting head of the Vladivostok Heat and Energy Resources Department. “But they then tried to use their monopoly on heat in the area to get more money and power from the city.”

“As the mayor controls the city’s housing fund, he is obligated by federal law to provide city services,” argues AESKO General Director Gennady Maslov.

The squabble has continued for months, and other government officials refuse to get involved.

Krai officials say the mayor should deal with the problem. A petition from residents to President Yeltsin and a telegram to Prime Minister Chernomyrdin brought no results. A federal Duma member says she’s sorry, but you have to deal with these problems yourself.

Is there any vindication for them? In a recent court case, one resident won 9,000 new rubles ($1,500) from the mayor’s office for emotional damages. The judge presiding over the case also demanded that the mayor’s office conclude an agreement with AESKO immediately.

But Cherepkov came up with his own solution to the problem.

In the last days of January, construction begins. The doctor Natalya Chudinova is told that her small garage is about to be removed. Rusted bucket-loaders begin digging up the frozen ground behind apartment 84.

Laborers huddle in truck cabs at slow moments as the temperature drops well below zero.

The mayor has decided to lay new pipes and connect them to another heat provider, and promises residents here that construction will take ten days. But the work is stalled because necessary connective pieces of pipe weren’t sent on time.

The pensioner, Tanina, looks up from her cooking and laughs. “It’s up to them to decide whether or not they will heat us, but it’s us who suffer because of the bosses,” she says.

“But there are only two months to go, and we’ll get by somehow. When spring comes, we’ll be basking in the sun.”