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English Language Page The Aginsky Buryatsky autonomous district faces an array of acute problems relating to the pollution of atmospheric air, ground soils, and surface waters. The average annual volume of hazardous substance emissions from the local fixed industrial facilities is in the area of 2 060 tons, including 900 tons in the form of hard wastes and 1 160 tons in the form of gaseous and liquid wastes. The overall volume of industrial and household sewage waters for the last reporting year reached 1.5 million m3. A particularly dangerous source of environmental pollution has been the Orlovsky mining and product preparation industrial operation whose storage facility is a major environmental source of heavy-metal contamination. No measures are being taken to improve the quality of the existing waste-water management technologies. The impact from large numbers of tourists continues to threaten the environmental balance of Alkhanay, a Buddhist sacred monument, and the adjoining national park. The indigenous people have been especially concerned about their inability to maintain proper sanitary standards and Buddhist traditions and customs, with so many outside visitors coming to see the sacred places. The residents of the village of Romanovka in Buryatia have been particularly concerned over the ongoing expansion of the local uranium mine. The AO Khiagda company started to develop the deposit without telling the locals anything about the operation, totally disregarding the concerns and fears of the local population. The streets of Romanovka and local ferry service across the Vitim river are clogged with endless sulfuric acid transports and uranium rock trucks. AO Khiagda would not commit itself to either building a separate connecting road between Romanovka and the subterranean uranium leaching facility or constructing a permanent bridge across the Vitim river. AO Khiagda is to take upon itself half the cost of constructing relevant infrastructure in the event that the industrial facility will be fully exploited. A timetable for hazardous-load transport on the ferry is yet to be defined and confirmed. Understandably, Romanovka residents do not change their schedule to avoid concurrent transport with the hazardous-loads the across the river. The transport drivers do not want to stand in line either, with the ferry attendants openly disregarding their rules. Clearly, this sort of attitude is fraught with danger. To illustrate, in early June 2001 a sulfuric acid truck had great difficulty parking aboard the ferry and spilled some of the deadly acid in the process. In June — early July 2001, the OAO Nizhneangarsky Rybozavod fishing company from Chana, Severo-Baikalsky district, had been using a small-gauge sweep net to catch small-sized omul fish. Experts from the Vostsibrybcenter and North-Baikal inter-district fishing inspection and regulatory agencies estimated that the numbers of young omul in the catches in relation to the total number of fish had been 60% for June and 90% for the first ten-day period of July. Logging is occurring within the city limits of Ulan-Ude (Buryatia). A particularly acute problem seen across the republic has been in the availability of quality drinking water. Available water supplies are 22.7% below the established sanitary standards for chemical indicators and 12.3% for microbiological, according to the reports for 2001. A big environmental security problem in the Altai territory has been the depletion of stocks of unique local biological fauna (artemia crayfish) found in Bolshoe Yarovoe lake. The regional administration has actually been instrumental in enabling the Arsal company to secure a license to catch the local artemia crayfish. This unregulated effort threatens to upset the lake’s ecological balance. The Avrora radioactive beryllium storage facility, which is a potential source of prohibitive risks in the event of either natural disasters (heavy storms, for example) or terrorist attacks, constitutes a major threat to regional environmental safety. Another major source of danger to environmental security in the Altai territory comes from the heptyl missile fuel that is released into the environment. According to some environmental security experts there are two sets of conditions that result in release of the fuel. First, the burnt-out stages of the launch vehicles fired from the Baikonur Space Center fall onto the lands of the Tretyakov district. Second, hazardous missile fuel is just being drained or dumped onto the grounds of the RS-20 missile base facilities in Aleysk and other local districts during eliminated of weapons in accordance with arms control agreements. The year 2001 saw a number of explosions destroying a series of missile launch silos designed to hold the RS-20 Satan ICBMs — the most destructive strategic missiles in the world. The village of Talovka, Zmeinogorsk district, holds as much as 20 thousand tons of scrapped polymetalic ores, which also presents a threat to the health of local residents. On February 1, 2001, a railcar holding heating oil jumped a set of tracks running through central Biysk. The main environmental threat now comes from the fact that the hazardous rail, running through the town, continues to be used to move trainloads of explosives. The atmospheric emissions from industrial facilities amounted to 247.7 thousand tons for the year 2000, including 49.6 thousand tons of sulfur dioxide and 25.1 thousand tons of nitrogen dioxide, according to the official statistics for Altai territory. Accounting for the larger amounts of emissions have been Barnaul (81 thousand tons), Biysk (39.7 thousand tons) and Zarinsk (25.7 thousand tons). In short, the industrial waste atmospheric emissions in the 1999–2000 period had risen above the levels for the previous period, apparently from an increase in the territory’s economic activity. The annual average wastewater disposal level is reported to be more than 30 million m3. As of January 1, 2001, the total area of woods and forests in Amur region stood at 30.3 million hectares, according to the State Committee for Land Resources and Land Management. A large number of forest fires occurred during the period of 2000–2001, radically worsening the environmental situation within the region. The area of forested lands engulfed by raging fires in 2001 stood at 53 thousand hectares, with the similar indicator for non-forested lands standing at 93.8 thousand hectares. Those fires had destroyed as much as 670.5 thousand m3 of wood. In addition to destruction by fire, forests continue to be wasted through unlawful logging operation. The volume of logs shipped via the railroad station Shimanovka for 2001 had been two times higher than the initial target fixed for scheduled logging operations. Poachers cause much damage to the environment also. In 2001, the regional hunting authority registered as many as 2 812 breaches of established hunting rules. A meager sum of 111 thousand roubles has been released by the regional environmental security foundation to restore local wildlife habitats and populations; the funding is clearly insufficient. The Amur and Zeya rivers and their tributaries had very low water levels in 2000–2001, resulting in the disappearance of many spawning grounds for rare fish. The Vladimir region managed to stabilize a variety of indicators of environmental contamination, despite growth in the volumes of industrial production and notwithstanding depleting environmental support funds. However, year after year the region continues to be confronted with a range of serious challenges. The most painful local environmental problem continues to come from ongoing environmental pollution coming primarily from industrial and household emissions and wastes. Annually, the region accounts for as much as 1–1.3 million tons of toxic and about 1 million tons of non-toxic wastes containing 323 categories of materials. Total industrial atmospheric emissions in the Vladimir region continue to be prohibitively high, showing a consistent moderately upward annual trend. Over the past few years one could see the overall industrial emission (48.4%) dropping below the level of hazardous emissions from mobile platforms (51.6%). To a large degree this shift could be attributed to frequent industrial bankruptcies, transfers of ownership rights of thermal energy plants to local municipal authorities, the change of some industrial facilities from using heating oil to natural gas, and the continuous increase in the numbers of road vehicles. Clearly, thermal energy providers, machine building and metal processing facilities, building materials producers, light, food and chemicals plants, utilities and farming activities, along with transportation and telecommunication businesses, have been the biggest polluters of the environment. Cancer death rates in the region have been seven times higher than those registered in the neighboring regions of the Russian Federation. Cancer statistics for residents of Vladimir are now equal to that of residents of such cities as Semipalatinsk, Dzerzhinsk and Sterlitamak. As many as 64% of the newborn babies are reported to have some congenital deficiency. Only 10–12% of children are healthy when they finish school, according to B. Anchugin, head of the Defend the Family and Younger Generation League. To illustrate the above, the town of Suzdal (without a single industrial facility containing smokestacks) holds first place for the total numbers of cancer cases. The reason appears to be rather simple: in a town dominated by cucumber growing, people burn too much greenhouse covering and inhale the hazardous fumes. The task of processing industrial and household sewage has a serious impact on health and the environment. In many cities and towns across Russia the existing waste management facilities have seriously degraded and continue to run bellow originally established specifications. Consequently, as much as 97% of the waste waters (a total of 190 million m3) continue to be dumped untreated (or insufficiently processed) into reservoirs. Under federal laws, regional authorities are held fully accountable for the development of the local waste treatment and managements facilities. The Vladimir region is supposed to have five household waste management centers, but the goal has yet to be met for lack of sufficient budget allocations. In August 2001, Vladimir and some of its environs was tested for levels of background radioactivity. The results showed that the city could pass as an area of acute radioactive contamination, particularly given that in some areas measured levels 90–100 times higher than natural background radiation. For example, the Vladimir–Bogolyubovo highway had some off-road spots measuring as high as 1 500 R/h. Those spots have not been fenced off or marked in any way, leaving most local people unaware of the insidious dangers on their soil. Without a doubt, Vladimir holds real dangers to the health and life of the people residing both within city limits and in its environs. In May 2001, experts from the Volgograd-based ecological laboratory found that the Volga river waters had been heavily polluted, with the surface covered by an oil film stretching for nearly seven km. The only source of contamination could be the military base located right next to the local water intake facility, according to the Volgograd-based experts. That military base was found to be involved in providing assorted fuels for the military based in the North-Caucasian military district, with pumping and reloading operations being carried out by the base’s facilities. Following a targeted investigation, the environmental security specialists became convinced that the drinking water intake procedures and technologies had not been properly observed. Notably, the water intake units had been placed too close to the water’s edge. What is more, these plants have been placed in backwater areas where there is no running water and pollutants tended to accumulate in huge amounts. In June 2001, the Nyuksensky district of the Vologda region had a large spillage of oil from the Ukhta–Yaroslavl backup oil pipeline, the damages being estimated at 10 million roubles. The slippage was caused by a faulty waste management system that turned out to be instrumental in the loss of 75.5 tons of commercial oil. About 18 tons of oil reached the waters of the Yuftiuga and Sukhona rivers, the latter being the principal waterway in Vologda region. The Sukhona pulp-and-paper industrial complex had its waste management lines ruptured twice. In July 2001, local dacha plots happened to be flooded by the facility’s industrial waste waters that even reached the Sukhona river. In the middle of October 2001, the very same Vologda region-based Sukhona pulp-and-paper industrial facility had its pulp refining operation performed with the use of calcium hypochloride that is known to have the capability to readily react with the waste water microorganisms to produce chlororganic compounds containing dioxins. Dioxins directly affect humans, triggering many types of cancers and disrupting the immune system. In the course of 2001, the Jewish autonomous area had over 33 thousand tons of pollutants dumped into the local air, with each local resident, on average, receiving six tons of hazardous “precipitation.” Untreated industrial and household wastes continue to be dumped into the area’s rivers and streams, with the indicator for heavy metals (copper, zinc, nickel and chrome) rising by 8.5%. The Jewish autonomous area operates 60 dumping yards, which during 2001 received as much as 35 thousand tons of industrial and household wastes. Not a single dumping yard is in line with the established requirements. Last year the local industries and households produced 80 thousand tons of toxic wastes and 700 thousand tons of ash and slag wastes. The area had registered as many as 200 forest fires during 2001, with the actual total being ten times as high. The fires destroyed over 13 thousand hectares of state-held woods and 5.5 thousand hectares of woods in the Bastak nature preserve. The environmental situation in the Republic of Ingushetia has been particularly desperate in the towns and villages of Nazran, Surkhakhi, and Nizhnie Achaluki in the Malgobek district. Those localities hold too many unauthorized dumping grounds, with the local streams Sunzha, Surkho, and Nazranka being heavily polluted with household wastes. Sewage wastes have repeatedly been directly dumped into the local river waters. The local producer of chemical conditioning agents and emulsifiers for many years has been the principal air and soil polluter in the area. Unfortunately, the problem failed to be dealt with last year. The facility is yet to install an in-house incinerator to eliminate its own chemical wastes. The unique Samura wood in Dagestan has been increasingly depleted. The world’s largest and Europe’s tallest sand dune Sary-Kum (having its own unique flora and fauna) has been incrementally polluted, with destructive sand quarry operations continuing unabated. Herds of cattle are let out to graze there, and plots of land are being freely seized for housing construction purposes. Over the last 30–40 years the sand dune has decreased by 20 m. Pollution of the Caspian Sea waters has exceeded the established norms by hundreds of times. Each year the region has 1.5 km3 untreated sewage (nearly 100 million m3 of that amount being made by fecal wastes) dumped into the Caspian Sea. What is more, the available waste water management facilities more often than not have been kept idle. Despite the fact that the tasks of protecting the fish stocks in the Caspian Sea have been handled by numerous agencies (including federal), poachers continue to thrive. According to expert assessments, the Caspian Sea may see its sturgeon and beluga populations disappear within the next 10–15 years, should the poaching operations continue unabated. As much as 85% of the Caspian Sea’s entire sturgeon stock is normally found to be growing out in the waters washing Dagestani shores. Dagestan annually has more than 120 thousand tons of hazardous pollutants discharged into the atmosphere. Notably, most of that emission comes from trucks and cars. Given its rich diversity of soils and weather conditions, the region is very different from other Russian regions or territories. As a result of environmental pressure the area has recently been confronted with the global problem of desertification. The open-sand area in the lands adjoining the Caspian Sea has been expanding annually at a rate of 40–50 thousand hectares. Urgent steps need to be taken to restore the environmental balance of soils in the Black Soils and Kizliar Pastures areas. Unregulated cattle grazing have caused irreparable damage to the local pastures. The loads on the pastures have been in excess of the acceptable levels by 1.5–5 times. What is more, the actual cattle grazing timetables have been out of line with the general guidelines for countering the persisting desertification of the Black Soils and Kizliar Pastures. The Black Soils and Kizliar Pastures account for 30% of the entire territory held by Dagestan and make up a zone of distant pastures for cattle rearing. By now as much as 78.5 thousand hectares of the zone’s lands have actually been laid barren. About 60% of the available pastures have been degraded into nearly useless lands to a medium, large or very large degree, with 24% of the pastures being contaminated with poisonous or useless weeds and 71% being heavily eroded. The situation regarding water supplies in Buinaksk, Izberbash, Dagestanskie Ogni, Derbent, Agulsk, Akhtynsk, Kazbek, Levashinsk, Karabudakhkent, Novolaksk, Shamil, Sergokalinsk and Khiva districts is rather desperate, as the drinking waters have been tested to be more than 50% above sanitary standards. Over the past ten years, the local radioactive wastes have been left unburied and unsecured, with such hazardous material being held by numerous research laboratories, larger industrial enterprises, and oil extraction and processing facilities. Forests are the principal natural resource of the Kirov region. Following the closure of the central nature preservation agencies and of the Federal Environmental Security Foundation, predatory and unconstrained logging operations have become the rule. The stated production targets normally have been exceeded several times over, with the first grade logs being readily passed off as second or even third grade products. Dummy agreements, duplicitous contracts with foreign consumers, and unaccounted-for cash-backed deliveries have increasingly become the order of the day. The natural gas and oil pipelines that have reached the end of their useful lives and are known to include a total of 10 thousand km of pipeline that have been heavily polluting the Krasnodar territory’s environment. Many local communities usually have their drinking waters bearing a thin coating of oil film. In particular, oil seepage has reached the wells in the communities of the Neftegorsk and Apsheron districts, as well as in the towns of Tikhoretsk and Yeisk. As it penetrates the soil, the spilled oil pollutes the local river waters and those of the Azov Sea. In the course of 2001, the Krasnodar territory’s water basins, particularly the Kuban river, continued to be polluted. The content levels of copper, iron, mercury and poisonous organic substances in those basins are known to be 10–14 times the prescribed amount, and in some cases 28 times the permissible concentration limits. One third of the local waste waters likewise has been prohibitively dangerous because the relevant treatment facilities have not been fully functional, with 118 out of the existing 180 waste water treatment plants being on the verge of collapsing. Krasnodar, Novorossiysk and Armavir are the more atmospherically polluted towns in the Krasnodar territory. The region’s hard waste incinerators discharged about 300 tons of pollutants in 2001. What is more, industrial calamities have been on the rise, with the total for 2001 reaching beyond forty. Pesticides, nitrites, radionuclides and erosion-generated disorders have largely degraded the fertile Kuban soils. About three million hectares of soils have been found to be in extremely poor condition. Over the past year the Committee for Environmental Security and Natural Resources had registered about 10 thousand breaches of environmental security legislation. An effort is currently under way in Krasnodar territory to implement a large-scale construction project, in which many countries have an interest. The project has been designed to put in place the Caspian oil pipeline system stretching for a total of 1.5 thousand km, with the Russian segment running for 305 km. The system’s initial throughput capacity has been designed to stand at 28.2 million tons per year. An effort also is under way to construct the Russia–Turkey main natural gas pipeline (seabed version) designed to move Russian-origin natural gas to Turkey at a rate of 3–16 million m3 per year. The year 2001 saw an emergency in the Novorossiysk sea port that threatened to result in irreparable material damages and cause a major loss of human life. The “Fedor Kotov” bunker-coal feighter, moving 950 tons, inadvertently had about three tons of heating oil spilling from its hull. The spillage had been caused by a 10-by-15 cm hole developing in the casing of Tank-8 held in the hull’s underwater segment. Industrial and household wastes continue to be the principal environmental pollution source in the Leningrad region. In 2001, St. Petersburg had as many as 300 huge dumping yards, with the Leningrad region running over 1 thousand similar operations. Annually, the city is known to register up to 20 cases of the local dumping grounds receiving radioactive wastes, according to the radiation hygiene division, the City Center of Gossanepidnadzor (State Sanitary Epidemiological Inspection) Agency. The reported radiation levels have been excessive in other areas besides local dumping yards. Six rather dangerous radioactive contamination spots have been found within the confines of the Tsarskoe Selo state museum-preserve. Some rooms in the Alexander and Pavlovsky palaces have been found to feature excessive levels of mercury and radon vapors. Occasionally, spilled mercury would be found in St. Petersburg. By way of example, recently it has taken several days for the entryways of a residential building in the city to be fully decontaminated from mercury. The level of contamination there was found to be 50 times the maximum permissible concentration, with as much as over one kilogram of mercury being collected in the cleanup effort. The operation was rather complicated because of the risk to the residents, who had to be evacuated from the contaminated apartment building. In addition, four kilograms of spilled mercury recently has been collected in the town of Sertolovo, Vsevolozhsky district. A discarded pressure gauge (holding 30–40 kilograms of mercury) designed for thermal energy plants had been found by local teenagers. Specs and splashes of mercury were then found in a number of local yards and apartment building entryways. The Magadan region had its mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, phenol, formaldehyde, dust, and suspended substances heavily exceeding the established levels, with the comparisons trending upwards over the last five years, according to the environmental monitoring findings for 2001. What is more, there were seven thousand cases of very heavy nitrogen dioxide concentrations in the region over the last five years. Each resident in the region, on average, accounted for 151 kilograms of wastes and pollutants released during the last year. Put simply, the region’s local districts are known to be heavily polluting the skies. Suffering most of all from the atmospheric pollution have been the residents of the Severo-Evenksky (857 kilograms) and Srednekansky (470 kilograms) districts, with the residents of Magadan (59 kilograms) finding themselves in a better situation. Anecdotal evidence has been provided about the pollution of town-based segments of streams and rivers. Unbelievably, in the summer months cars could be seen daily washing up from the Talon-Stream running through Berelekh, a Susumana suburb, to the public rest zone located within 100 meters of the district prosecutor’s office. Notably, pollutions in the water-safeguard-zone peak in the afternoon hours all the way through sunset. Industrial enterprises have continuously been seen discharging chemical compounds into the atmosphere. Inasmuch as those emissions are normally launched in the dark hours, the relevant supervisory agencies, Department of Environmental Security, and other structures can hardly sue those enterprises or slap any sanctions on them. The worst polluters in the Republic of Marii El, which periodically discharge chemical compounds into the local skies, include: AO Marbiafarm (releasing methylmercoptane), TETs-2 (1) (releasing benzopylene by way of refining the barrels containing the traces of fuel or solar oils), and the Yoshkar-Ola meat processing and packing plant. To make matters worse, these larger industrial enterprises nearly have never been penalized, with any and all sanctions normally being received by private-sector businesses for undertaking hard waste incinerating activities. Over half the residents in the Novosibirsk region live in localities with pollutant concentrations growing beyond the established safe levels on a regular basis. For the reporting year of 2001, the total of waste emissions in the region nearly reached 890 thousand tons containing over 400 pollutant items, according to the Novosibirsk-based environmental security monitoring center. The morbidity rates for residents of the Republic of Mordovia have been growing year after year. The problem of environmental safety is particularly acute in the city of Saransk, containing the major industrial facilities of Mordovia. The local skies receive over 140 types of hazardous substances, with 40 of those classified as highly toxic categry-1 and category-2. The worst danger for human lives comes from benzapyrene, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, lead, and other pollutants. The overall volume of discharges reaches 35 thousand tons per year. Drinking water is also a big problem. The content of fluoride in the Saransk-supplied potable waters generally exceeds the maximum permissible levels for pollutants by a factor of 1.6, and for iron by 1.5. The destructive effects of electromagnetic emissions from the RV-65 radio tower on Tereshkova street were scientifically confirmed several years ago. However, it was only in the middle of 2001 that the radio tower, placed in the very center of Saransk, was closed. Medical experts have recently confirmed that people living in the vicinity of the RV-65 facility have been more vulnerable to cardio-vascular diseases (by nearly 2 times), to endocrine diseases (by 1.7 times), and to malignant tumors (by 2.2 times) than the city residents living elsewhere. Importantly, as many as a thousand people have been living in the “deadly” zone. The OAO Novosibirskenergo company is the principal producer of toxic emissions and wastes in the territory of the Novosibirsk region. Novosibirsk Tin Combine, and Novosibirsk Switch Assembly Plant are known to have been responsible for 85% of the regional pollutions. Of the required standard, only 13% of the wastes and emissions have been cleaned. The Semipalatinsk nuclear testing ground, of course, has created a very big environmental problem within the Novosibirsk region. Over half a century of nuclear tests has resulted in the residents of Novosibirsk and the region’s 15 districts having received a total radiation dose of 5.4–7.5 rems. Regrettably, nothing had been done to improve the condition of this hazardous environmental zone during the past year. One cannot help mentioning such Novosibirsk regional problems as the continuing erosion of the banks of the Novosibirsk water basin (with the water area annually growing by 20 km2), shrinkage of Chany lake, and the increasingly diminishing productivity of the local farming lands. The review of environmental safety in the Orenburg region for 2001 allows one to conclude that the environmental security is disrupted. As many as 2 896 industrial enterprises (159 operations out of those being potentially dangerous for the environment) contribute to the overall effect, according to the Committee for Environmental Security and Monitoring of the Orenburg regional administration. The NOSTA company, Novotroitsk-based chrome production facility, Yuzhpolimetall, Yuzhuralmash, Kuvandyk-based cryolite plant, Mednogorsk copper-sulfur plant, Orenburg natural gas processing facility, Kiembaevsk asbestos plant, and Iriklinsk state regional power plant are the principal polluters of the local environments. The atmospheric air tests in the village of Zagonny in the Orenburg region, revealed that the nitrogen dioxide indicators have been exceeding the maximum permissible concentrations by 1.2 times and sulfuric dioxide levels reached beyond the established maximum permissible indicators by 2 times. This condition has been produced by the operations maintained by the Karachaganaksk natural gas complex, now owned by the friendly Republic of Kazakhstan. The Orenburg region (especially the city of Orenburg) also has been suffering from the lack of good drinking water and many other persisting deficiencies. Out of 16 Penza region-based industrial enterprises known to be discharging wastes into Sura lake, merely three operations have been outfitted with dependable waste management facilities. Though, indeed, they have taken certain steps to improve the health of Sura lake, the industry executives need to admit that corrective therapy has not been radical enough to restore the quality of the water in the lake. To further emphasize, the industrial enterprise from Kuznetsk, Sursk, Chaadaevka, Lopatino, and Shemysheyka dumped into the waters of Sura lake as much as 8.7 million m3 of liquid wastes or sewage, including 7.4 million m3 of semi-treated sewage and 1.3 million m3 of wastes without any treatment. About 600 residents of Penza and Zarechny have basically been using water supplied from a cesspool. For many years now, people in the region have been rattled by the continuing presence of the Leonidovka chemical weapons base, the largest Russian chemical munitions storage facility. In the 1950s, barrels with chemical agents would just be dumped into the waters of the nearby lake, according to the elderly Leonidovka residents, members of environmental security NGOs, and veterans of the military unit ¹21222. Unfortunately, no dedicated investigation into the matter has been conducted, with the local and environmental security NGOs being barred from undertaking a similar effort. Each year about 500 thousand tons of pollutants are expelled into the atmosphere by 3 930 industrial enterprises and 600 thousand trucks and cars in Primorsky territory. Over three million tons, or 96%, of the suspended pollutants are captured by the available dust and gas cleanup facilities. The principal sources for pollution of the atmosphere are cars and trucks and heat and electricity power plants, including the more than 1.5 thousand small-sized thermal energy plants or the so-called boiler-houses. Given the overall palette of emissions, the discharges from cars and trucks appear to be the more dangerous emissions in terms of both lethality and total amount. It is precisely the trucks and cars that emit over 66.5% of carbon monoxide, 46% of nitrogen-based compounds, 93% of carbohydrates, to say nothing of prohibitive volumes of benzapyrene and dioxins. The ubiquitous use of the premium leaded gas serves to produce lead-polluted strips along either side of any given highway or heavily-traveled road, with the lead content in the air usually exceeding the maximum permissible concentration by a factor of 5–10. The territory maintains no monitoring stations of roving patrols to document levels of dioxins or dioxin-like toxins. As a reminder, those cancer-producing agents are normally found in the areas of dumping grounds, power plants, and vehicle parking lots. In Vladivostok, 24% of hazardous emissions are usually produced by the local industrial enterprises. The city’s over 200 thousand cars and trucks have been responsible for 51% of the polluting discharges within the municipal limits. Poor quality of the atmosphere in the town of Ussuriysk is primarily attributable to the regional highway running through the town and to 500 local boiler-houses. Given the lack of financing to support the Ussuriysk TETs project, which would provide for centralized heat and electricity supplies, the numerous small-sized boiler houses cannot be closed. In the course of 2001, the rates of increase for hazardous atmospheric emissions tentatively were estimated to have been in the area of 1.5–2%. The reason for this is that the local TETs and GRES heat and electric power plants receive low-grade and high-sulfur fuels and oils, and that the industrial equipment is overstressed. Obviously, all this leads to irregular operating conditions and overburdened scrubber assemblies, especially in the winter months. For example, on October 16, 2000, the Vladivostok-based TETs-2 heat and electric power facility had its filtering unit on Boiler Assembly-2 malfunctioning. What is more, within 1997–2001, only one ash-scrubber unit (carried by Boiler Assembly-6) had been refitted, with the original plans calling for as many as six such units to be replaced. As of December 31, 2001, the territory had 453 registered dumping yards, measuring a total of 1 303 hectares, with 354 of those being designed to receive solid household wastes, 1 processing facility for household wastes, 21 industrial tailings storage facilities, 7 major ash dumps, and 29 manure and droppings pits. Inasmuch as the problem of putting in place a dumping yard for hazardous wastes is yet to be resolved, the more toxic wastes continue to be kept in storage on the grounds of the industrial producers of the wastes. The local industrial facilities are known to be holding on their grounds the following amounts of particularly hazardous wastes: 900 tons of galvanic wastes, 100 tons of discarded mercury-holding bulbs or tubes, and 579 tons of toxic non-spec agro-chemicals. In the course of 2001, environmentalists disclosed 232 incidents of polluted, abandoned, degraded, or wasted fertile soils measuring 57.5 hectares. Notably, in 214 of those cases (encompassing an area of 54.4 hectares) a series of focused efforts have been made to restore the soils polluted with oil products and heavy metals. For example, following an industrial calamity at a Ussuriysk carton factory three years ago, an effort has been under way to eliminate the effects of a fuel oil spillage through the use of Putidoil and Destroil biological agents within an area of 1.9 hectares. The effort resulted in reducing the concentrations of oils held by the soil down to the permissible levels. (1) ÒETs — heat and electric power plant. Finishing of the report Back |
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