Till Cold Do Us Part

The residents of the Russian North are freezing

Russian people say: no one will take care of you, if you do not take care of yourself. It seems that local authorities of Russia’s coldest regions know this saying very well. The public utilities complex of the republic of Yakutia turned out to be completely  unprepared to fierce winter cold.

Local authorities ordered industrial enterprises of the Yakutia republic to produce small stoves for heating apartment buildings. Those little stoves are known in Russia as burzhuika, or “little bourgeois.” These wood-powered stoves are called like that because only “rich” people could afford them after the revolution of 1917. This information was received Monday from the press service of the Far East department of the Russian EMERCOM.

The press secretary of the department, Tatiana Popkova, said that breakdowns happened to boiler houses very frequently due to severe frost. The administration of the republic, as well as EMERCOM services started looking for additional opportunities to warm people up. The first batch of 70 stoves has been completed today at Zhataysk ship-building factory.  The stoves will be shipped to the settlement of Kyzyl Syr, where people are freezing in their houses. The press service also informed that stoves like that would be shipped to other cities and towns of the republic: Lensk, Neryungry, Mirny.

Russian EMERCOM informed that Yakutia was not the only region of the country that was unprepared to severe winter. Heating problems occur in various regions of the Russian Federation, all over the country. Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-two people were deprived of heating power in the city of Saratov. There are 702 kids among them. The heating power current was broken there over a breakdown at a local boiler house. As a result, seven nine-storied apartment buildings have no sources of heating. Yet, as EMERCOM press service informed, the supply of heating power was resumed to two buildings, in  which 545 people live.

Akhtyam Akhtyrov
PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov