A chill has invaded once-cozy homes. Ice hangs from leaking municipal pipes. And the only reliable source of heat in this small town is a private gas line that exasperated residents built themselves.
Russians are suffering through one of the coldest winters in recent memory, but nature is only partly to blame. Across the country, municipal utilities are failing to fulfill the basic task of heating homes.
Some 350 000 people nationwide have shivered this winter in unheated apartments, offices, schools and hospitals as heating systems sputtered in a country where temperatures rarely rise above freezing from November to March.
Russia’s utility monopolies are notoriously inefficient. Except for electricity, metres are rare, and consumers pay a set sum for heating and water depending on the size of their apartment and the number of residents. Most radiators cannot be adjusted; windows are often left open in the dead of winter.
In recent years, the system has become too expensive for consumers — and for the government. A lack of funds has led to nationwide delays in maintenance, resulting in an epidemic of breakdowns.
The government is trying to make consumers pay, gradually cutting subsidies for all but the neediest. Critics say raising prices for ordinary Russians — whose average monthly salary is about 4 700 rubles ($150) — does not address the core issue of inefficiency and thus won’t help end the crisis.
In Sudogda, an industrial town tucked into a pine forest 200 kilometres east of Moscow, about 10 000 of 14 000 residents rely on central heating. This winter, some 8 000 have had inadequate heat or no heat at all, said Sergei Voronin, chief of the town’s civil defense and emergency department. Among the worst affected are residents of the Yubileiny neighborhood, where the municipal boiler broke in late December.
Most residents are relying on wood-burning stoves and electric heaters, as temperatures dip to minus 30 degrees C.
On a recent afternoon, resident Maria Zvereva (68) cornered Voronin outside her building, waving her January electric bill. It was 813 rubles ($25). In trying to warm her apartment with electric heaters, she spent almost her entire monthly pension. ”What am I supposed to live on? My pension is 839 rubles ($26)!” Zvereva shouted.
Yubileiny’s boiler failed last year, too, so some residents knew what to expect. Fifty-three families joined forces last summer to pay for a natural gas line to the neighbourhood and outfitted their apartments with gas-burning boilers that have kept their homes toasty.
When the boiler broke, Sudogda officials decided to hook up the rest of the neighborhood to the new gas line. The administration is now wrangling with the line’s owners over the price. Yuri Mamushkin, who sold his cow to pay for his share of the gas line, said owners want fair compensation for their money, time and aggravation. The remaining residents — many of them elderly ‒ wish their neighbors would take pity on them and work out the financing
later.
Inside Anatoly Apyonov’s apartment, windows are iced over and the wallpaper bulges from cold. Apyonov’s breath is visible as he curses the government.
”This is what I sleep in,” said the 65-year-old former factory worker, dressed in layers of sweaters and traditional felt boots. The situation elsewhere in Sudogda is only slightly better.
Minor heating breakdowns occur daily, and some apartment buildings are heated only at night. Residents fill plastic bottles with boiling water and hug them. They leave gas ovens burning 24 hours a day and suffer headaches as a result.
Plus, many Sudogda residents can’t remember the last time they had hot water — and sometimes there is no water at all.
Evidence of worse times to come lurks in the basements of Sudogda apartment buildings, where rusting pipes leak water and raw sewage.
Regional prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the Sudogda heating crisis, but placing blame is not easy. Formally, the municipal Housing and Utility Company, controlled by city administrators, bears responsibility for heating the town. But the problems predate the company, which in the 1990s inherited boilers and pipe networks once managed by factories that maintained housing for their workers.
Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, factories shed such assets for efficiency. Utility company director Vladimir Sergeyev said ideally, he would convert the entire town to gas heat — an economical option in gas-rich Russia.
But conversion requires cash. The company is mired in debt, and employees have not been paid since November. The regional government provides money for day-to-day needs but not enough for major overhauls.
Meanwhile, Sudogda residents pay more and more each year for utilities — currently, about 1 000 rubles ($31) a month for a family in a three-room apartment — and get less and less for their money.
”People tell us, ‘We pay you, but you can’t provide us with quality service,”’ said Sergeyev, who keeps his coat on in his chilly office. ”They’re right.” – Sapa-AP