Two people froze to death in Moscow, officials said on Tuesday, as Arctic cold from Siberia descended on western Russia, sending nighttime temperatures to as low as minus 36 degrees Celsius and prompting warnings of power cuts to some businesses.
Forecasters said the cold snap in the Moscow region is expected to last most of the week as local authorities implement measures to ensure smooth functioning of the public infrastructure amid the sudden plunge in temperatures.
State schools said students do not have to attend as long as the temperature remains under minus 20 degrees Celsius in the morning, while buses in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and other cities were filled with special ”Arctic” diesel fuel to minimise disruptions, the daily Izvestia reported.
Traffic police officers, an omnipresent feature on the streets of Russian cities, were issued with ”emergency felt boots”, while train stations and other public transport sites were told to let homeless people to take shelter inside rather than being trounced out as usual.
Russian broadcast media and newspapers were overflowing with breathless reports about the low temperatures, which forecasters have predicted would range between minus 20 and minus 25 during the day and minus 30 to minus 36 overnight for the next week in the Moscow area, the business daily Vedomosti said.
”The capital for the first time has come up against a situation where, due to the cold, its demands for energy may well exceed supplies,” Vedomosti quoted Nestor Serebryannikov, the former head of the Moscow municipal power utility, as saying.
”In Soviet times, we would shut off the power supply to industry at night. Today there is no industry and all these buildings have offices in them instead,” and so the power cannot be shut off, he explained.
The Interfax news agency said two people died of hypothermia in Moscow overnight, while another 14 were hospitalised as a result of exposure to the cold.
The report quoted an unnamed source in the city’s emergency call service as saying that a total of 107 people have died in Moscow from the cold since October.
Many media reports spoke of the ”Chubais threat”, a reference to a warning last November from Anatoly Chubais, head of the Russian electric power monopoly United Energy Systems (UES), who said that power supplies may have to be cut in the event of a severe cold snap in the Moscow region.
The Moscow city government, however, set up a special ”headquarters to counter the Siberian freeze” and Izvestia quoted an official there as saying that any power cuts would only be to non-essential businesses and would not affect ordinary Muscovites.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov on Monday evoked possible economic fallout from the cold.
”Managers at all levels will do everything possible to ensure that there will be no losses over this period,” he told a government meeting. — Sapa-AFP