Lucy Jones
DOCTORS in Baley, a small gold mining town in the Russian far eastern region of Chita, had long been puzzled by the high incidence of babies born without limbs, bald children and adults with abnormally big heads.
They guessed such deformities might be related to the nameless mine, located on Baley’s outskirts, where potatoes grew the length of cucumbers. But as government enterprise 1084 was top secret, they could discuss it only in private.
In 1992, the Russian government disclosed the ghastly facts behind the deformities. “Products 17 and 18” mined at Baley until the mid-1970s were thorium and uranium. Government enterprise 1084 provided material for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb.
Previously famed as the birthplace of warrior Ghengis Khan, Baley is now better known in the region for being an environmental disaster worse than Chernobyl.
But, while environmentalists are calling for the complete relocation of the town’s 25 000 citizens, officials say there is not enough money even to seal the mine.
No one in Baley knew the nature of enterprise 1084, say locals. Cattle grazed on the luscious grass covering the lethal uranium tailings and a car repair shop was housed in a former thorium storage facility.
Worse, radioactive white sand was taken from uranium pits at the mine to build and plaster homes, nurseries, schools and the hospital. Some people now live in homes with radiation levels 10 times the measurement officially considered safe.
Until recently, children put on plays in the palace of culture, which emitted radiation at 42 times the safe level – the same degree of contamination as cars leaving the Chernobyl nuclear reactor directly after the accident in 1986.
“Just visit the children’s ward and you will see the effect such levels have on peoples’ health,” said a paediatrician 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% of children in Baley are mentally deficient, according to a report by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Rates of still births are five times higher than the Russian average, of child mortality 2,5 times higher, of miscarriages and congenital defects 1,4 times higher, and of Down’s 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 Yevgenny Suriva, aged 45. “My youngest daughter couldn’t speak until she was five. 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 to where we had come from.”
The hospital in the town can do little to help. The medicine cupboards of the chief doctor, Vladimir Catsik, are empty and he has no diagnostic equipment. Half his staff are on hunger strike in protest at not having been paid for 10 months, and the hospital was barely heated in winter.
“We mined 400 tonnes of gold for this government but now nobody takes care of our people. We are no longer necessary. We sit on gold, yet people don’t have enough to eat,” said Dr Catsik.