“It’s so cold in the apartment that even vodka can’t help.”
For the third day in a row, residents of the Moscow region are freezing due to numerous utility failures. Podolsk, Lobnya, Lytkarino - the list of settlements where there is no heating in apartment buildings is long. The situation is especially difficult in Klimovsk - in this microdistrict of Podolsk it was even necessary to introduce a local emergency regime.
Pre-New Year information in the media about how high-ranking Moscow region officials are fulfilling children's dreams posted on the “Christmas Tree of Wishes” launched a kind of flash mob among residents of the Moscow region. People from different cities near Moscow write on social networks that they also have a cherished dream: for light and warmth to return to their homes.
“My children and I have been living with my sister for three days, but my husband stayed at home. He says you can’t leave the apartment unattended. What if the radiators burst when the heating is turned on, the frosts are down to minus 27 degrees!” says Tatyana Ivannikova, a resident of Klimovsk.
According to the woman, the temperature in the apartment in the three days since the heating was turned off dropped below 8 degrees.
“It’s so cold that even vodka didn’t help my husband warm up. Yesterday he and his neighbors lit a fire near the house, he says it calmed the situation a little, but people are still extremely angry. Because the Moscow region authorities love to boast about how wonderful our parks are, how everything is wonderful and beautiful in the region, and everything works like clockwork, but as soon as really severe frosts hit, the entire heating main in the city was covered with a copper basin,” says Tatiana.
On Friday evening, heating began to be supplied to several houses that had been without heat since January 4. But on Saturday morning the temperature began to drop again.
“At least we have light in our house, but some people have problems with electricity. Entire streets are frozen, pipes have burst in many houses, it seems to me that now they won’t be defrosted until spring,” the woman sadly sums up.
Indeed, last night the Moscow Region authorities reported to the media that they managed to start one of the boilers at the departmental boiler house of the Klimovsky Cartridge Plant, where an accident occurred on January 4, which left 173 apartment buildings and a local hospital without heat. But soon the situation got out of control again: due to severe frosts, the system froze, and during startup, numerous breakthroughs occurred both on the heating main itself and in houses. As a result, a local state of emergency was declared in the city. Officials explain that this will make it easier for them to combine the efforts of all emergency services and capacities of the region in order to eliminate the accident in Klimovsk as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, the long-suffering microdistrict of Podolsk is far from the only place in the Moscow region where people are now freezing to death. In Lytkarino, according to residents, the only boiler house in the city was out of order; the city administration, however, soon reported that the problem had already been solved and the supply of heat to the houses had been resumed, but people objected: the batteries in the houses are no warmer than fresh milk.
In Krasnogorsk, there is also an accident at boiler house No. 7, two densely populated microdistricts - Chernevo and Bruski - are freezing. There are chronic problems with light in the Chekhov urban district. Peshkovo, Alachkovo, Venyukovo – these settlements have constant power outages. There is also an apocalypse in Lobnya: some houses are freezing because old boiler houses cannot cope with the increased load, while heat is not reaching others due to numerous breaks in worn-out pipelines. The mayor's office promises to urgently patch up all the holes, but now that the ground is frozen, it is difficult to carry out “excavations”; people are afraid that they will have to freeze for a long time.
“The main reason for the numerous accidents in the housing and communal services system of the Moscow region, which occurred this winter not in extreme frosts - we do not live in Africa, and we are not used to frosts - but in the fact that intensive housing construction is underway in the Moscow region, but the engineering infrastructure is it is not being modernized, the networks are old, worn out, and more and more residential complexes and entire microdistricts are being hung on them. This was bound to lead to accidents eventually. So the frosts in this case only served as a catalyst for the launch of negative processes,” says Maxim Fedorov, an expert in the field of housing and communal services, Candidate of Economic Sciences.
