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English Language Page February 23, 2001, saw the commissioning of the first power-generating unit at the Rostov power plant (Rostov region). The interests of 250 thousand people residing within a 30-km radius of the nuclear power plant were ignored. The Rosenergoatom State Atomic Energy Committee blatantly disregarded safety recommendations from the Ministry for Management of Emergency Situations. These recommendations included: the construction of shelters accommodating 160 persons each, the recruitment of 1 900 Ikarus coaches (who should be available at all times to evacuate Volgodonsk residents in the event of an emergency), the construction of a secondary paved road from the power plant, the construction of a deep-well water intake designed to produce at least six thousand m3 of water per day, the purchase iodine-containing curative drugs in the amount of 170 kilograms, and the purchase of 180 thousand GP-1 gas masks. The city of Rostov-on-Don is one of twenty environmentally unfriendly Russian cities known to feature particularly dangerous atmospheric pollution levels. The city administration recently announced a planned experiment to have the city’s moving companies use better-grade diesel fuels, with the expectation of developing the plan into a full-fledged program. Unfortunately, following just four months of implementation, the experiment came to a halt, with the pertinent program remaining in the development stage. Over the last few years, people in the region have been seen suffering from diseases the numbers of which have never before been registered here. One outpatient clinic in the city of Novocherkassk saw a large number of endocrine diseases, reflected in a 100% growth rate for this ailment in the last ten years. Importantly, these patients were nearly 7% of all residents treated by the given clinic. As it turned out, the increase had primarily been due to an increase in diabetes mellitus. There are newly emerging thyroid gland diseases produced by excessive radioactive water and air pollutions, and the incidence of thymus gland ailments have increase by almost a factor of ten over the past decade. What is more, between 1995–2001 the number of cases of hypothyroidism (never registered in the region before) had come to 52. Throughout the Rostov region, the existing river and land-based environmental control systems appear to be getting totally disrupted. The disappearing stocks of high-value fish in the Azov Sea — Don River Basin serves as illustration enough. The local sturgeon populations have almost completely disappeared because of disruption of the spawning grounds at the Tsimliansk dam after elevation of water levels. The sturgeon catches, which used to be weighed in thousands of tons, have dropped to just dozens of individual fish; this number is not high enough to maintain the remaining spawning plants. Also, the stocks of migratory fish have been catastrophically depleted, the principal reason being the ill advised and unbalanced management priorities of the Don river resources and the lack of relevant authorizations to flood the Don river estuary and floodplain. Commissioning the Rostov nuclear power plant would signal the end of the migratory fish in the Don river and fertility of the floodplain. During 2001, about a million tons of hazardous substances had been discharged into the biosphere of Samara region, according to the recent expert assessments. Given that the authorities have released this number, many non-government environmentalists have been inclined to not take it at face value. During July 1–2, 2001, the background radiation level of the city of Tolyatti exceeded the usual value by 37 times. The source of hazardous emissions had never been uncovered despite numerous tests and assumptions. Flood water-induced vibrations of the Volzhskaya GES (hydroelectric power station) facility’s dam might at any time trigger an earthquake in the city of Tolyatti. An earthquake monitoring and tracking center in Tolyatti was set up only last November 2001. Notably, this challenge is particularly pressing for the entire Samara region because in February 2001 Samara did have an earthquake, which through sheer luck caused no material damage or loss of human life. Within the first half of 2001, the Sverdlovsk region had 496 industrial enterprises checked out for the volumes of pollutants discharged into the atmosphere. It was found that 78 industrial facilities had been expelling hazardous substances in increasing amounts. The levels of emissions from fixed industrial facilities came to stand at 751 thousand tons, which is 3.4% lower than the similar indicator for the previous half-year. Out of eight larger cities in the region, only four communities had their hazardous emission volumes on the rise, those polluters including Nizhny Tagil and Serov. Power-engineering and metal-smelting plants account for the biggest emissions, the indicators standing at 38% and 45% respectively. A dumping yard 10 km away from the town of Asbest was reported to receive 100 tons of toxic wastes categorized as chlororganic pesticides banned for agricultural uses and detrimental to human health. The Smolensk region continues to have a very real land radiation pollution threat coming from the Desnogorsk AES nuclear power plant facility, designed to run the Chernobyl-type (RBMK (2)-1000) nuclear reactors. This power plant’s operations are known to have had regular contingency stoppages, with deadly radioactive vapors being expelled into the air. A major problem of late has been the disposal of the regional center’s household and industrial solid wastes, particularly, given that the Sheinovsk dump yard has been overburdened. The dump yard is a real environmental threat, for it exudes large volumes of poisonous gases that at times spontaneously ignite, thereby producing smoke clouds tending to engulf the nearby residential neighborhood. To compound it all, toxic filtrates seep into the ground water. For rather a lengthy period of time in 2001, the residents of the village of Tiushino, Kardymov district, Smolensk region, just could not stop the persistant discharges of manure from the local livestock farm into the nearby lake, which continues to support life for the entire community. In November 2001, the levels of air pollution in the regional monitored communities continued to reach beyond the established health standards, according to the Hydrometeorology and Environmental Security Office of the Republic if Tatarstan. Kazan registered higher concentrations for hydroxide (53 cases), phenol (2 cases), nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde (1 case each); Nizhnekamsk featured the same macabre statistics for sulfuric hydrogen (7 cases), nitrogen dioxide (4 cases); Naberezhnyie Chelny had excessive indicators for nitrogen dioxide (13 cases), sulfuric hydrogen (5 cases), and nitrogen oxide (4 cases). The local waters fail to meet the established standards for safety. The Kazanka river had two registered cases with water samples holding oil products and copper in excess of the maximum permissible concentrations. The issue of closing the “wild” (unauthorized) dumping yards has been particularly pressing. New dumping grounds have been emerging faster than unauthorized ones can be closed. Given the heavy rains, the Naberezhniye Chelny-based poultry farm had its dam (holding the droppings pit) heavily ruptured. The sewage eventually reached the waters of the Kama river. The local fish stocks sustained tremendous damage; the estimated value standing at 200 thousand roubles. Just the city of Naberezhniye Chelny and its surrounding rest zones, alone, have been found by the environmental police to carry as many as 29 unauthorized dumping sites. The environmental conditions in Stavropol territory are critical. Each Stavropol resident annually has been the target for over 200 kilograms of pollutants expelled into the atmosphere, according to the Natural Resources Committee, Stavropol territory. At present nearly 23% of the region’s water resources do not meet the established sanitary standards. As a result, the numbers of bronchial asthma, allergy, and gastrointestinal disease in the territory have been up by 25–30%, according to the expert assessments. The existing laws provide a broad range of environmental security rights: the right to safe environmental conditions, the right to complete information on the health of environment, and the right to redress for the damage suffered by properties or persons. Notably, over 3 936 environmental security breaches were registered last year. However, over the past decade Stavropol has not seen a single appeal filed by locals with law enforcement agencies to claim redress for the damages sustained by the properties or persons, according to the official statistics. The year 2001 saw a series of accidents occurring to aggravate the environmental safety in the Republic of Tatarstan. Here area just a few telling examples. On April 16, 2001, about 11 tons of fuel seeped through a hole in the local pipeline and reached the waters of the Kilevka river, which run into the larger Kama river. A set of protective floating booms had to be deployed to prevent the polluted area from growing larger. Luckily, the subsequent water content tests showed that the maximum permissible concentrations of oil products had not been exceeded, according to experts from the Ministry for Management of Emergencies and Goskomsanepidnadzor, Republic of Tatarstan. The damage caused by a number of small-sized fuel spillages to the local environment in the Chistopol district was valued at approximately 1.3 million roubles. To be specific, as much as 15 thousand m2 of farmland were taken out of production because of diesel fuel spillages, with 10–150 tons of that fuel reaching the Kama river waters, according to some assessments. Leakages from the Nizhnekamsk–Nizhny Novgorod main solar oil pipeline were also reported. One of the Nizhnekamskneftekhim industrial facilities had a spillage of aqua ammonia occurring in 2001. The health of the Tula region waters continues to cause much concern. The region holds rather a large concentration of machine building enterprises (dependent on the use of specialized technologies), chemicals plants, large-sized smelting facilities, to say nothing of numerous heat and electricity power plants. Notably, many of those industrial enterprises could hardly be called environmentally friendly businesses. At the same time, out of the existing 360 waste management facilities only 10 plants are reported to have been running as promised. The drinking water situation has not been improving over the reporting period. Tap water is reported to have a prohibitively high content of iron. While the ferric salt content is supposed to be within 7 mg/l, tap water contains as much as up to 10 mg/l, with certain local water supplies containing 35 mg/l. The consumption of hard water provokes gallstones, kidney stones, arthritis and arthrosis, according to health experts. Just like in the previous years, in 2001, the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the region continued to be unsatisfactory. Tula leads Russian regions in terms of statistics for a number of human ailments. The principal reasons for these statistics are poor quality of the available drinking water, unsecured waste incineration activities, and atmospheric air pollution from metal smelting operations. A high number of cases of tuberculosis in local cattle have been reported out of the Kireev district. Increasingly on the rise has been the adverse impact associated with noise and vibration on people living in the direct vicinity of highways and major city thoroughfares, as well as on users of municipal public transport. The cause of this problem has to do with the overall obsolescence and degradation of streetcar, and buses, rails and pavement. In the course of 2001, the Tyumen region had as many as 247 emergencies, which was a 35% rise over the previous year. Notably, nearly all of those (about 98%) had been industrial in character. To underscore, the numbers of casualties had risen by nearly a factor of two, to reach 638. Over the same period the reported natural disasters had led to 11.2 thousand people sustaining some losses, a 17.3% rise over the previous year. The bulk of industrial disasters had been oil or natural gas pipeline ruptures that could, for the most part, be attributed to aging infrastructure. Seasonal floodwaters have been creating an emergency situation across the Tyumen region. In the course of 2001, as many as 10.7 thousand people suffered rather heavily from those natural disaster, even though as much as 23.3 million roubles were spent to provide for counter-flood activities, 3.3 times the amount spent in the previous year. The overall cost of improving existing hydraulic and dam facilities reached about 61 million roubles, and the final damages were valued at 164.8 million roubles. The Yarkovsky district was particularly badly hit by last year’s floods. What is more, year in year out, the Uporovsk, Tyumen, Uvat, Yalutorovsk and Nizhnetavdinsk districts have been struggling to save their assets during seasonal flood attacks. Only 80% of the region’s residents feel they can be protected against the risk of flood waters, according to the local authority for civil defense and emergency management affairs. The issue of providing the local population with a supply of quality drinking water continues to be rather acute. The Tyumen region indicators for the quality of existing water supplies appear to be considerably poorer than those for the neighboring regions and poorer than the Russian Federation in general. Just as during the previous year, in 2001 the principal environmental hazard in the Ulyanovsk region was the degradation of the local environment by sewage flowing from industrial enterprises and utilities. Efficiency of the available waste water management facilities (with most of those being obsolescent and deficient) leaves much to be desired. The local Sviyaga river waters are unhealthy, and in 1986 the river was officially closed to bathers and swimmers. Though toxic wastes have been dumped into the river in lesser amounts (primarily as a result of the Ulyanovsk radio tube assembly plant being closed), the bacteriological condition of the local waters remains dangerous for humans. A radiation-exuding windowsill was recently (in May 2001) discovered in the children’s hospital in Dmitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk region; it seems that the building materials contained an increased concentration of natural radioniclides. Understandably, all of the children coming to that hospital for treatment had been putting their lives at risk. Gossanepidemnadzor experts are supposed to be involved in all construction site and project giving approvals (especially when it comes to possible radiation-related risks), according to the established SNIP (construction norms and specifications) requirements. Reports have been made to confirm the presence of spots containing augmented gamma radiation levels that could pose a threat to human life. Efforts have been under way in the region to test the sensitive areas for uncontrolled eruptions of radon — a radioactive natural gas. Importantly, the city of Ulyanovsk has 20 locations showing augmented radiation levels. For the duration of a month in October–November 2001, the Russian Far-Eastern Mining Company was dumping hazardous waste waters into the local Silinka river flowing into the Amur river. The daily damage caused by the enterprise to the environment was valued at nearly half a million roubles, according to local environmentalists. Each Khabarovsk resident annually accounts for 222 kilograms of hazardous emissions and solid household wastes of 1.2 tons, with toxic wastes reaching 257 kilograms. The local atmosphere, soil, and water have been poisoned with assorted chemicals that are known to cause a whole palette of ailments — from disparate allergic reactions to immune system deficiencies. Statistics indicate that over the past decade respiratory, blood, neoplastic, and endocrinal diseases have grown in numbers several times over. Thrown into the local skies each year have been over four hundred thousand tons of varied deadly substances (the overall volume amounting to 150 freight trains) — sulfuric dioxins, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbon and lead oxides, benzapylene, etc. To underscore the problem, the Amur river water, which is consumed by the locals, is known to carry as many as 27 hazardous ingredients. Lead concentrations along the regional highways exceed the established permissible limits by 10–15 times, the similar comparisons for other chemical elements running as follows: cadmium by 12 times; mercury by 10 times; zinc, copper, cobalt, nickel, chrome, tin and strontium from 5 to 150 times. To date, Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Amursk and Nikolaevsk-on-Amur have been registered as Russia’s most polluted cities. Last fall marked the peak of local forest fires that have come to be a veritable environmental disaster in Khabarovsk region in the last few years. The 2001 forest fires, which started in mid-September, could be compared to the 1998 forest-fire calamity in terms of scale and aftermath. The 1998 fire, which destroyed 2 390 thousand hectares of taiga forest, was passed by UN experts as a “global-scale disaster.” The more painful and critical environmental problems in the Chelyabinsk region have been related to radioactive contamination of some local lands, solid wastes, and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exhaust fumes from trucks and cars. The most polluted city in the Chelyabinsk region, and probably in the whole of Russia, is Karabash — the only community in the Russian Federation proclaimed an environmental disaster zone. The city holds a copper smelter that remains functional (for several years now) with no in-house waste management system to speak of. The local regional and city authorities have cleared all this; the primary motivation being to save jobs and generate revenues to support the prospective installation of the requisite waste management plant. To emphasize, the ZAO Karabashmed facility is known to have been emitting annually 89.9 thousand tons of hazardous substances, according to the Chelyabinsk-based hydrometeorology and environmental security office. To point out, 87% of those emissions contain sulfur, lead, zinc, arsenic and manganese — highly deadly substances that severely damage the environment. Out of 205 children in the 5–6 year-of-age group examined by the experts from the Chelyabinsk-based sanitary and epidemiological authority (Sanepidnadzor), 102 (49.8%) had internal lead content exceeding the permissible levels, six (2.9%) displayed augmented levels of cadmium, and two children showed elevated arsenic levels. The environmental contamination in the Chechen Republic could easily be called critical, with certain area showing all the signs of a natural calamity. Though nearly all industrial operations have long since been rendered inoperative, persisting environmental pollution levels have risen, as a result of ongoing military operations. To provide an example, Russian air attacks on the Grozny-based chemical plant produced a dramatic release of uranium, cesium-137 and cobalt-60. With military engagements being continued, an effort has been under way to make the best use of the available natural resources by resorting to barbaric extraction techniques. In the first place, there are ongoing homemade oil-extraction and refining operations. One can see convoys of departing Russian military trucks employed on a daily basis to move oil products produced by local mini-refineries. To date, nearly 10% of the republic’s lands have been polluted with oil products, exceeding the maximum permissible concentrations by several times. Things have been particularly bad in Grozny. To provide another example, the capital city’s Zavodskoy district now has in its aeration zone an oil lens up to 12 meters thick and a million tons in volume. The areas with numerous petrochemicals industrial facilities and power plants are known to be annually discharging over 900 tons of hazardous heavy metals-holding substances per 1 km2, according to the Zemlia National Research Center. Never before had the republic (particularly the oil extraction areas) accounted for such tremendous volumes of unauthorized wastes and emissions holding oil and other hazardous substances capable to heavily degrade the local soils, waters and air. Although Russian environmentalists keep confirming the persistant environmental disaster in the Republic of Chechnya, they can hardly afford to undertake any practical steps to rectify the situation. “Following the operation of those crude oil-refining units, one can now see whole lakes and streams of oil products that kill local vineyards and farming lands,” reported Vladimir Grachev, Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Environmental Security Affairs. Roughly 40% of the region’s farmland are contaminated with pesticides in amounts that exceed the permissible limits several times over. This has occurred primarily because storage regulations and application rules have been breached. The result is that the local natural equilibrium has been heavily disrupted, affecting biodiversity and environmental stability not only in the region but also throughout the North Caucasus. Inasmuch as the mighty local rivers (containing a large amount of hazardous substances) flow into the Caspian Sea, the latter’s stocks of high-value fish are dying out. The Caspian Sea is known to be receiving annually as much as 300 thousand tons of poisonous chemicals and hazardous substances. So, with the balance of nature disrupted, the region has increasingly become non-viable. To rectify the situation, a most pro-active intervention on the part of environmental safety experts is urgently needed. The most pressing tasks is to restore the farmlands, setting up greenhouses, and other relevant measures. However, before that kind of effort could be launched, military operations would have to be discontinued. During the course of 2001 the health of the environment in the Chita region did not improve in any meaningful way. Unacceptably high pollution indicators of the atmosphere, water, soil and other natural resources have remained the same. The air in the city of Chita has been particularly polluted, with the annualized average indicators for formaldehyde, dust and nitrogen dioxide levels exceeding the maximum permissible concentrations rather heavily. This circumstance has to do with the fact that TETs-1 and TETs-2 heat and electric power plants, as well as the principal local dumping grounds had been inexpertly positioned in terms of prevailing winds. Also, regular forest fires have been a major source of air pollution. Notably, as many as 1 112 forest fires had been registered in the course of 2001 throughout the region. Benzapyrene and mercury continued to pollute the city’s lands. The principal culprits have been the existing coal burning boiler houses and TETs facilities producing heat and electricity for Chita residents. The public has been particularly concerned about massive logging operations that would occasionally break into local public recreation zones and settlements. Obviously, this unregulated effort only leads to degrading the landscape, eroding the soils around the local dacha settlements, and touching off forest fires, because the pilferers would normally abandon the tree-tops and branches that they did not need. Numerous Chita residents have visited the local legal aid clinic to raise these issues. The quality of the groundwater has not changed, with pollution levels continuing to be rather high. Nearly one- third of consumers of water receive their supplies from the centralized providers that do not meet the established quality standards. The viral hepatitis epidemic, which erupted in the fall of 2001 in Chita, was primarily attributable to the poor quality of the tap water. The total number of people affected totaled 16 262 (4 877 in 2000, and 1 614 in 1999). Nearly half of the victims (8 200) had been children. Baley and Oktiabrsky, Krasnokamensky district reported the most unfavorable radiation-related environmental safety situation. In 2001, the regional prosecutors ran a focused legislation compliance verification check to know more about the radiation contamination in the Krasnokamensky district. Serious breaches of the legislation have been uncovered. The population of Oktiabrsky is 2 850 people, with one-third below the age of 18. The settlement found itself surrounded by a number of extraction and processing enterprises, dumps, and a sulfuric acid plant. The area is poisoned with radionuclides, with gamma-radiation levels exceeding the safe limits by more than three times. What is more, the local soil holds sulfate-ions whose concentrations exceed the normal background levels by 5.8 times. The apartment buildings have been found to hold radon (radioactive gas) and its decomposition products. Notably, radon concentrations have been reported to exceed the safe levels by a factor of 300. Given the above facts, the health conditions of local residents are just catastrophic. Every second child comes into this world with some kind of deficiency. In 2000, Oktiabrsky had six times as many registered cancer cases as in the year before. The same statistics for the first half of 2001 is 2.5 times higher than that for the entire year of 2000. Tragically, no effective measures have been undertaken by the authorities to assure safety of the people’s health. Chuvashia is fairing somewhat better than most Russian regions on issues of environmental safety. It one of few regions with relatively clean air. This enviable circumstance has to do with the fact that Chuvashia’s industries, for the most part, have been either largely idled or running to reduced capacity. The local rivers and lakes are polluted to a moderate degree, the reason (to repeat) being that the local industrial enterprises have not been over-active. The water pollutants mostly include oil products as well as compounds of copper, zinc, iron or organic substances. However, this region has its own pressing environmental problems. A particularly acute problem has been the question of the rising waters in the Cheboksary GES (hydraulic electric power station) water basin. Should the level be allowed to rise again, another 30 thousand hectares of the local farming land would be lost. In the past, when the water level increased a few years ago, 40 thousand hectares of high-value woods and meadows had been flooded and lost for production purposes. The town of Tsivilsk had a private gas and car service station put in place right on the bank of a local pond holding crystal-clear water that comes right from subterranean springs. The owners had all the right approvals. Regrettably, they disregarded the risk of the poisonous leaks and waste waters from their business getting into the pond’s clean waters. The environmental situation in Tsivilsk could hardly called good. This community sits at a crossroads connecting all republican highways, with the levels of hazardous vehicle exhausts reaching beyond all thinkable levels. While the effort to have all public schools to be appropriately outfitted with modern information technologies and computers (the goal being so much heralded by the education reformers) is yet to be completed, the local sanitation and health inspectors point out that the rules to operate the computer hardware have been nearly universally violated. By way of example, only six Cheboksary-based public schools have been checked for compliance with the established computer handling rules. All of the six schools have been breaching the safety rules. Notably, the computer rooms in the Tsivilsk-based public schools have come to be wholly out of sync with the established requirements for installation. The environmentalists in the Yamalo-Nenetsky autonomous district continue to grapple with the problem of closing down the abandoned oil and gas wells. The biggest hardship in this matter is that those abandoned wells are normally to be found at far-away locations with no connecting roads available. Overall, as many as 300 non-functional and abandoned wells have been noted as at-risk facilities. The problem of local extractors developing the region’s resources on their own has come to be even more challenging. Unauthorized operations (with no targeted feasibility studies having been completed) usually lead to the destruction of large tracts of the very thin fertile soil and produce a lot of harm to the local environment and indigenous communities. Of course, these are just a small part of the environmental problems confronting the Russian Federation today. On the other hand, the completed monitoring effort has revealed some experiences to be emulated and, possibly, replicated. The Stavropol territory provides a good example of such efforts in ensuring the human right to environmental safety. Given the persisting air, water and forest contaminations, as well as the prohibitive radiation levels (this list of environmental security challenges for the Stavropol territory is far from complete), the importance of environmental monitoring as a basic strategy to assess and track the conditions of land and water ecosystems has come to be particularly great. Monitoring the health of the environment in order to set specific regulatory guidelines, certainly, has become a most pressing challenge. The principal monitoring tasks appear to be as follows: tracking environmental contaminations, assessing and forecasting the health of the given environment, and identifying the key pollution sources and factors. The Stavropol Territorial Center for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, the regional laboratory for tracking environmental pollutions, and the governmental network of pollution tracking stations have been involved in an effort to monitor the environment within the confines of Stavropol territory. They have been authorized to independently measure contamination of the air, groundwater, soil, riverbed sediment, rain and snow. Monitoring activities have been conducted through the use of nine fixed and two roving stations designed to be reflective of man-made factors having a negative impact on contamination levels in residential areas. Fixed stations in Stavropol, Nevinnomysk and Mineralniye Vody have been placed in the environmentally friendly neighborhoods. The Kislovodsk and Piatigorsk-based monitoring stations have been located in the resort areas. The monitoring and tracking stations have been measuring concentrations of hazardous substances (dust, sulfuric dioxide, solvable sulfates, hydrocarbon oxides, nitrogen dioxide, nitrogen oxide, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, ammonia, soot, formaldehyde) three times a day. Plans have been drawn up for air pollution tracking stations to be deployed in the towns of Georgiyevsk and Essentuki. Apart from checking air pollution, the Stavropol Center also has been employed to monitor the chemical content of the waters in the Kalaus, Kuma and Podkumok rivers. Samples for testing are supposed to be scooped at 14 spots on all three rivers. Active monitoring efforts are normally focused in the low and high water periods six times a year. In the course of 2001, the environmental monitoring laboratory had completed a number of extra tasks in tracking persisting contamination. Based on initial data, a daily effort is undertaken to compute the air pollution levels for a given city calculating an “R parameter.” In 2001, the Izobilnensky district was examined for the presence of environmental contaminations emanating from the Stavropol-based natural-gas industrial facility, Kavkaztransgaz company. Last year, the laboratory responsible for overseeing the management of building and structural waste (LMZOS) assessed the health of the environment in the area of the ongoing construction project of Nevinnomysk-based Tolulilendiizocionate production facility. The purpose of this ongoing survey effort was to monitor the air and the condition of the local rivers. The LMZOS laboratory has been conducting moving surveys of communities in the Caucasian Mineralniye Vodi on a quarterly basis in compliance with the 1993 Ruling (¹1063) of the Council of Ministers of the Government of the Russian Federation “On the Federal Program for Development of the High-Security Environmental and Resort Region of the Russian Federation.” This effort has been undertaken because of unfavorable environmental conditions and heightened risks of air contamination in the towns and regions of the Caucasian Mineraniye Vodi. The data gathered will be used to assess the status of the environment, provide forecasts and make decisions related to the management of assorted economic activities in the region. In the third quarter of 2001, an effort was made to monitor the environment around the post-construction Caspian oil pipeline system facility (Stage III) of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. The LMZOS laboratory also worked together with the commission responsible for drafting a program for monitoring the hazardous emissions from the pipeline facilities held by OOO Astrakhangazprom, the Astrakhan–Kamysh–Burun main oil pipeline. Over the past year a number of agreements have been concluded to conduct joint research activities with three local universities in order to perform some educational and functional tasks in the area of environmental monitoring and to examine the neighborhoods of Stavropol not covered by the fixed tracking stations. An agreement has been reached to assure the exchange of information between the Stavropol Territorial Committee for Natural Resources and Stavropol Territorial Center for Environmental Monitoring. Also, agreements have been reached to provide for the exchange of information in the area of environmental monitoring between the Stavropol and Budennovsk State Sanitary and Epidemiological Centers. Of course, one could hardly say that this Subject of the Russian Federation is the single region where people are fighting for healthy environmental conditions. Admittedly, nearly every Russian region has its own “green” organization battling against the barbaric efforts to degrade and annihilate the available natural riches and environment. It just happened that the Stavropol non-governmental organizations managed to appropriately structure their efforts. However, it is on the federal level that the overall environmental safety policies are defined and vectored. (2) RBMK — high-powered boiling reactor Back |
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