Emergencies, Disasters and Scandals, Oh My!

Peat Fires

After deadly fires ravaged central Russia last summer and choked Muscovites with smog, people are starting to ring the alarm ahead of the spring thaw, realizing that nothing is being done to prevent new fires from engulfing yet more forest and villages.*

Greenpeace experts from the Moscow office said that, unlike previous winters, peat bog fires this year have continued to burn well into January, despite being beneath a thick cushion of snow. This means the fires could restart as early as April. Meanwhile the Emergency Situations Ministry assured the public that the fires have all been extinguished.

From Mikhail Shlyapnikov’s blog. He lives in a Ryazan oblast village.

“Yesterday we went to film burning peat bogs, this time with Reuters... and met a local farmer. This muzhik has been asking for two months for the right to clear burned logs from out of the peat bogs (to prevent them from fueling new fires in the spring). He has two tractors and is willing to pay for each cubic meter of this burned (useless) wood that he hauls out of burning swamps...

Can you guess the administration’s response? “For burned wood, you must pay us 1000 rubles, everything that burned is still alive in our documents. There was no forest study, so there is no proof that it is dead! The forest never burned!”

Pavlusha Chichikov and his kopeks and rubliks off of dead peasants [reference to the protagonist’s scheme in Gogol’s Dead Souls] is child’s play today! Today those who rule Russia are those who pocket dead trees!”

Photo by Greenpeace Russia climate expert Igor Podgorny.

* The 2010 Russian wildfires destroyed some 2000 buildings and did over $15 billion in damages. MunichRe has estimated that 56,000 people died from the fires and the effects of last summer’s heat wave.

Tu-154

Hundreds of bloggers pitched in this winter to purchase a snowmobile for Sergei Sotnikov, who lives in the small northern town of Izhma, and who maintained the town’s abandoned airstrip well enough that it was able to support the miraculous landing of a Tu-154 plane when its electrical systems failed mid-flight.

The flight, operated by Alrosa, was headed for Moscow from far-northern Udachny when it had to make an emergency landing. The plane might well have crashed in the forest if the pilots had not spotted an abandoned runway near Izhma. No plane had used the landing strip for 12 years, and helicopters land there just twice a year. The plane overshot the runway, but none among the 70 passengers or crew was injured, since the landing strip was in acceptable condition. Sotnikov, who is the airport’s head, had been maintaining the runway for 12 years on his own and without help from federal or local budgets.

“I hoped that small aviation would be reborn. Hope dies last,” Sotnikov said when he was invited to a studio to participate in Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in session in December. While the plane’s pilots received medals from the Russian president, Sotnikov’s story surfaced after the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda told his story. “I would stop people from riding horses on the strip, clear falling logs, chop down young trees,” he told the paper. “I cleared it for myself, so that it would look nice.”

Bloggers at the popular website dirty.ru started a campaign to thank Sotnikov with the purchase of a snowmobile, which should come in handy in his remote Komi town. In January, after the required R300,000 ($10,000) was collected, the snowmobile was shipped first to Ukhta, and then trucked to Izhma.

Drama

In Russia, a play is always more than a play.

In Kamchatka, local chinovniki started squirming when a popular holiday play, New Year Adventures of Cinderella, hit a bit too close to home for local residents annoyed with a new policy.

The trouble started last year, when the region implemented measures set by President Dmitry Medvedev and switched Kamchatka onto a new time zone, one hour closer to Moscow. The switch caused massive protests in the region, where locals considered the move tantamount to stealing an hour out of their day. After the change, daylight was so short this winter that children now must be taken out of school earlier and energy bills are climbing, because lights have to be kept on longer during waking hours.

Then came the play. In one scene, the King moves the clock hands back one hour (so that Cinderella can stay at the ball for another hour), which sparked roaring applause. After the third performance (and the third outburst), the play’s actors were summoned to the regional administration and told to cut the scene from the play, because it “discredits federal laws.” So wrote Communist politician and former Kamchatka Governor Mikhail Mashkovtsev on his blog. The actors refused to comply with the censorship of a fairy tale, and finished the play’s run in unedited form.

Icicles

A Sword of Damocles shaped like an icicle is hanging over the career of
St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, who is blamed for wintry chaos in Russia’s northwestern city. Leaking roofs, sidewalks with mountains of snow, and icicles (sosulya.ru) that maim passersby have turned the city into a gauntlet of winter hazards. The last straw was the January 13th death of six-year-old Vanya Zavyalov after a block of ice fell on his head from atop a five-story building.

Matviyenko, who is nicknamed “Tyotya Valya” (Aunt Valya) and who became immensely unpopular after she lobbied in favor of planting a massive Gazprom skyscraper in the city center, has been dubbed “Valya the Fascist” by some bloggers, who fume that they are powerless to remove a governor who is a pal of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

To mobilize and raise awareness,
St. Petersburgers are launching social networking websites like zalivaet.spb.ru. The site asks people to map leaking roofs in the city and advises how to best fight for your rights with city authorities. Meanwhile, the popular news website fontanka.ru launched a contest for the longest icicle in the city:
bit.ly/f3Dh9Z

Ice Storm

Governor of Moscow region Boris Gromov is seeing a dip in his already paltry popularity ratings this winter, after an unusual ice storm in late December caused falling trees to break powerlines throughout the region, leaving thousands without power for weeks.

Several districts were in a “state of emergency” while people sat in the dark for weeks, including over the winter holidays, unless, of course, they took matters into their own hands and hired and paid electricians themselves.

On New Year’s Eve, Prime Minister Putin reprimanded the governor during a personal meeting broadcast on Channel One: “Go to these regions, to these towns, and celebrate New Year’s with them... and in the morning, report to me about the results.” While the images were certainly effective, victims of the outage were hardly in a position to hear or appreciate Putin’s lashing, unless their TVs were powered by a generator.

“Our task is to once more tighten measures for icicle monitoring”

Valery Osipov, head of St. Petersburg’s
Kirov city district administration (Itogi)

СОСУЛЬКА, -и; мн. род. -лек; ж.

1. icicle. С крыши свисали сосульки. Also figurative, as in Кто-л. как сосулька. (someone is cold as an icicle). Can also be used o describe something which hangs down or is frozen in an icicle-like manner, for instance wax on a candle, resin on a tree, or hair. Волосы висят, спадают сосульками. 2. slang: a worthless, pitiful, weak person.