vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #165 / Social life / Reading article...

Throughout Primorye, aging military arsenals are ticking bombs. And kids are hauling explosives back to their homes and schools.

Sergei Palyony teaches wood and metal work at the village school, and all year he has raised alarms about the explosives that children have been finding in the woods nearby.

A departing army base dumped the ammunition, but Palyony’s complaints to police about the dangers yielded no action. So he showed up at a Village Council meeting in March, armed with a striking educational tool: an explosive-tipped round intended for airplane machine guns.

“I actually presented the explosive to the president of the Village Council,” Palyony said.

The council members nervously warned that the round could explode on impact if dropped, the teacher said. But they did nothing about the problem. Then late last month a boy named Sasha Kuznetsov blew off three fingers and maimed his face while playing with a live shell. Since then, workers have removed 2,000 bombs, missiles, detonators and other explosives from within the village, half an hour outside Ussurisk, according to a Civil Defense and Emergencies Department flier distributed around town.

Vozdvizhenka isn’t unique. Throughout Primorye, military ammunition dumps threaten citizens and pose environmental hazards. There are such 250 arsenals, said the Primorye Commission for Emergencies. But in the past five years, there have been major explosions at six Primorye depots, two of them within greater Vladivostok.

Some depots were abandoned as the military closed bases; others are open but inadequately guarded. The explosives are threatened by everything from age to the wildfires that sweep through the taiga before summer rains begin and after things dry out in the fall.

On April 3, forest fires in Pogranichny County near the Chinese border ignited two military warehouses, setting off 120 mm and 150 mm shells. The blasts damaged neighboring roofs and blew windows out of homes, and authorities evacuated 4,000 people, according to press reports. No injuries were reported.

Firemen and soldiers wearing flak jackets and driving armored vehicles fought the blaze. The fire destroyed 10 armored troop carriers, one armored personnel carrier, 13 multi-purpose light armored tractors, four howitzers and 180 tons of oil.

“This is quite an urgent problem in the spring and autumn,” said Gen. Vladimir Kulin, deputy commander of the regional army headquarters in Ussurisk. “The grass is sometimes taller than a person, and when it’s on fire, it burns like powder. Also, there are certain time limits when you can store ammunition. Then it’s supposed to be destroyed.”

In Pogranichny County, the army had seen the disaster coming. The day before the explosions, a spokesman announced that forest fires were 500 meters from the arsenal, but there was no fuel for bulldozers to cut a firebreak in the brush.

There have been other close calls this spring. In Boyets Kuznetsov, forest fires recently threatened Pacific Fleet arsenals, which store ordnance and small arms ammunition. Firemen stopped the blaze 800 meters from the depots.

The army’s Kulin said the danger is even greater at Pacific Fleet arsenals, where ammunition is older. This prompted fleet spokesman Viktor Ryzhkov to retort, “He’s a swine.”

“We have few men, but we keep control,” Ryzhkov said. “If there are cases, they are investigated at every level, from FSB to the Fleet. You can’t say we are lax on safety.”

In Vozdvizhenka, pilots used to dump unused ammunition in swamps, said Col. Vladimir Krechkin, commander of a second army base that still remains in the area. (People wouldn’t dump ammo now, he said, because of an ammunition shortage.) As the water receded in recent drought years, children began finding explosives.

“There are small shells, and they’re not very dangerous for people,” he said. “You have to work very hard to make them explode.”

Army officials in Ussurisk, however, said the risk is serious in places where military bases have been abandoned, such as Vozdvizhenka.

“It’s an urgent problem, and it becomes obvious when a military unit leaves,” said Igor Rezvin, press officer for the headquarters. “It’s mainly because of the negligence of the military bases, because they’re supposed to detonate them. But it’s expensive.”

The danger is compounded by destitute adults who gather shells, disarm them, and sell the casings to scrap metal dealers. Last month in Novonezhino, a village 40 miles from Vladivostok, a man hid 64 explosives in a vegetable garden, planning to sell them, police said. But several boys discovered the cache, lit a fire, and tossed in a shell. The explosion killed one boy and seriously wounded two others.

In Ussurisk recently, crowds of poor and homeless people lined up at a scrap metal dealership to sell what they had gleaned from the streets and their homes: rolls of wire, old gas canisters for camp stoves, sacks of aluminum Lenin medals. Vadim Chava, who co-owns the business, said he doesn’t accept shell casings and military equipment. It’s illegal, he said, although he added that he has accepted and melted down military airplane aluminum.

Outside the gate, a man hauling in a burlap sack full of scrap metal said it is easy to sell disarmed shells if you know where to go. The man, who declined to give his name, said middlemen working out of their homes buy shells, then in turn sell them to scrap metal dealers.

After the injury of the boy in Vozdvizhenka, workers gathered all the ammunition they could find and exploded it between two corroded bunkers outside of town. Days later, torn scraps of metal, a few live bullets and a detonator still lay on the blackened land. The civil defense department also distributed a leaflet promising prizes to kids who tell authorities where there are shells. All that is a little late for Sasha Kuznetsov, the boy who was injured. But maybe the message will reach someone else.

“Children still bring in all kinds of things, even grenades,” Palyony said. “I always tell the children, ‘Don’t touch them, because it’s death.’”