Investment in excess of $8 billion needed
Record-low temperatures that strained heating mains to the breaking point in a small industrial town last week may have marked a turning point in how the authorities handle post-Soviet decay.
Catastrophe struck on Jan. 22 in Alchevsk, a town of 130,000 in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, when plummeting temperatures burst two heating mains, leaving the town’s residents frozen and angry.
Alchevsk relies for most of its winter warmth on centralized Soviet-era heating systems that are in need of desperate repairs, rather than independent boilers. When its heating mains broke, hundreds of buildings in Alchevsk, including schools and hospitals, were cut off from heat as temperatures outside dropped to -31 degrees Celsius. When the heating mains broke, the rest of the system down the line was left to freeze in the cold.
The Emergency Ministry’s press service said that the breakdown was primarily the result of long-term neglect of Alchevsk’s heating pipes, which are more than 25 years old.
Like Alchevsk, any other town in the country could fall victim to Ukraine’s outdated and unreformed Soviet housing and communal services system, said one government official.
“About seventy percent of Ukraine’s heating system is warn out and needs to be renovated, while about a quarter of it is in critical condition and must be replaced immediately,” said Vasyl Kvashuk, deputy head of the Emergency Ministry’s civil protection department.
The country’s largely industrial eastern regions are often at a disadvantage compared with the rest of the country because many of the heating systems in the region had once been supported by large industrial enterprises, many of which are no longer in operation, said Kvashuk.
President Viktor Yuschenko, who visited the freezing Alchevsk on Jan. 30, said the need for reform in the housing and communal sector has become an urgent issue adding that Alchevsk will be the “starting block” for the reform.
“Alchevsk today has made us look at our housing and communal system differently,” Yushchenko said during his visit.
He said the centralized heating system in Alchevsk will be renovated and diversified with a number of boilers around the city, installed primarily in the area of educational and medical institutions.
Yushchenko said that among the most important steps in his envisioned reform is the privatization of ZHEKs – state-owned housing and communal services centers, – implementation of energy-saving policies, and the construction of high-quality housing.
Larysa Fedorchenko, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Construction and Architecture, and the Housing and Communal Sector, said that four years ago the ministry adopted a document describing a reform plan for the sector, but only after the Alchevsk accident have some of the country’s top figures begun taking the issue seriously.
“In fact, this document envisaged a special line in the [state] budget for the prevention of accidents at the most critical facilities,” said Fedorchenko.
She said that last year the ministry requested that the budget allocate Hr 500 million ($99 million) for such preventive purposes, but the government did not provide any financing at all. Fedorchenko doubts that the situation will be any different this year.
Deputy construction minister Orest Lototsky said that a minimum of Hr 40 billion ($7.9 billion) would need to be spent over the next 10 years to modernize the country’s entire housing and communal complex. For comparison, Ukraine’s annual budget stands at approximately Hr 110 billion ($22 billion).
Yushchenko said that local authorities should be mostly responsible for changes in the sector.
“Progress will depend on their active stand on issues and their professionalism,” said Yushchenko. “Moreover, there are sufficient resources and finances in the regions to support reform.”
While Ukraine’s top politicians discuss ways to implement reforms, residents of towns neighboring Alchevsk are worried that a similar catastrophe could befall them as well.
“Of course we are worried when we look at what’s going on in Alchevsk,” said Svitlana Orlova, head of the internal policy department at the city administration of Stakhanov, a town of 100,000 located just several kilometers from Alchevsk.
“Most of our buildings were built on average sixty years ago, and about eighty percent of our city pipes are in desperate need of replacement.”
Stakhanov’s municipal authorities, however, played it safe by paying for and installing boilers for schools and kindergartens. Orlova said that nearly all of the city’s 21 schools and half of its preschools now have boilers.
Meanwhile in Alchevsk, residents are still shivering and skeptical about the president’s promises to make the city warm again within 12 days.
“We were cold before the accident, too, because that heating was very weak anyway,” pensioner Lidiya Zubova told the Post by phone on Jan. 31, as repairs works in Alchevsk were still underway.
“Right now we’re wearing our winter coats in our apartments, and it’s difficult to sleep at night,” she said. “But it’s better now compared with the [plus] two degrees that we had inside last week.”
