White Sea near Igumnovo (Dzerzhinsk)
The landscape resembles the shore of the North Sea, somewhere near Ostend. Sandy dunes, lightly dusted with snow. The sea is indeed enormous and white — whether from snow or from sludge. The beauty is monstrous: blindingly white sand, the purest water. But what looks like water is in fact an alkaline solution. One of the largest sludge ponds, popularly known as the "White Sea," lies 800 meters from the village of Igumnovo. Sludge is a solid, powdery waste product of chemical production that contains organic matter. The sludge pond covers 54 hectares, is 8-10 meters deep, and holds a volume of 2 million cubic meters.
Crunch, crunch — we trudge through slush mixed with sand toward the shore. The air smells good and seems fresh. "Ha! If the air doesn't smell of anything, that doesn't mean there's nothing in it. Many gases simply have no smell, or only a very faint one. Dioxins, for instance! - Dmitry smiles and widens his eyes theatrically. - One gram of dioxin can poison 30 million guinea pigs. And by the way, we're breathing all of this right now!
My legs suddenly buckle, and a yellow sign reading "Caution! Hazardous Zone!" swims before my eyes. We go down a path to a flowing ditch - once the Volosyanikha stream. Its mouth skirts the White Sea and flows into the Oka. The water in it is dark brown and smells like photographic developer.
Fish used to live in the Volosyanikha. Now there is fish in small ponds around the sludge pond. Quarries were once dug here to build a sand embankment around the White Sea. Water collected in the quarries, forming small ponds. Men hang around them, fishing.
"Aren't you afraid to fish here?" we ask two "penguins" warming themselves with moonshine.
"What's there to be afraid of? We're already poisoned as it is. Worked 15 years at the 'Yava' plant," the "penguins" answer, pulling one small fish after another out of the ice hole. Amur sleeper is incredibly tasty, the men assure us, offering us half their catch. Ecologist Dmitry Levashov says that excess concentrations of heavy metals have been found in the soil and water of Igumnovo: iron, cadmium, lead, mercury, copper. They are also present in the carrots, potatoes, and beets grown by the villagers.
Even so, the villagers' children and grandchildren come from Dzerzhinsk to Igumnovo as if to a dacha. All the villagers worked in chemical production, and all are disabled - some of the second group, some of the third. "Yes, the air here isn't what it used to be, - says Baba Varya, shaking her head; we've stopped at her place to warm up. - I'm from Siberia myself, and there the air smells of fir trees and moss. But here, when the smog rolls in in the morning, you might as well pray to the saints."
The old woman bustles about the kitchen, tossing dark bricks - graphite - into the stove. Graphite electrodes are used to produce table salt by electrolysis.
When burned, graphite releases dioxin. There are no forests around Igumnovo, so residents heat their homes with graphite. It used to be possible to draw any amount of it from the plant. Later, however, the graphite began to be hauled to the dump, but some drivers sell it to residents instead, for 1000 rubles a truckload. The poisons released by burning have neither color nor smell, and residents believe that lung disease simply comes from hard living in general.
"It works out six times cheaper, - Baba Varya mumbles through toothless gums. - Graphite burns 2-3 times longer than coal! And gas is an expensive pleasure: just hooking it up costs 5 thousand rubles!"
By rough estimates, the residents of Igumnovo burn more than 400 tons of waste graphite products a year, releasing up to 150 tons of lead, chlorine, sulfur, nitrogen, and other harmful compounds into the atmosphere. It's also said that if a chicken happens to peck at graphite crumbs, it dies on the spot. On the other hand, crayfish have appeared in the Oka in recent years - creatures that live only in clean water.
Source: V.Chelikov, R.Razborkis, "A Different Kind of Cleanliness"
Urban legends of Dzerzhinsk
Among old-timers there are claims that the "White Sea" is merely a cap, beneath which complex organic residues are sealed away - waste from the production of mustard gas and lewisite.
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Older people still remember the diesel "cuckoo" - a tram that ran past the checkpoints of the chemical plants. It carried workers, many of whom had psychiatric disorders acquired from years of hazardous work. Instead of coherent speech, these unfortunate people could only make sounds distantly resembling a cuckoo's call. That is probably why the train got its name. | 
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"Yava" and "Oka" - make a fool of you. That was a saying about two workshops producing tetraethyl lead. Shifts there lasted about four hours; workers retired at 40, and by 45 - ended up in the madhouse, or something like that. |
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In August, Andrei Zubov, an armed security officer at OAO "Sintez," stole a batch ( more than 400 liters ) of ethyl fluid from OAO "Sintez" containing the highly toxic component tetraethyl lead ( TEL ) - an extremely potent poison that causes pulmonary edema and damages the central nervous system. The main symptoms of poisoning are headache, weakness, drowsiness, and loss of appetite. This substance can only be handled while wearing gas masks and protective clothing. Direct contact with "ethyl" vapors can cause instant death. The substance, classified as hazard class 1, had been produced in Dzerzhinsk for 60 years; over the last decade this had been the only such production facility, i.e., a monopoly in Eastern Europe, and it was closed at the start of this year. Two criminal cases were opened over this incident at once: for theft (Art. 158 of the Criminal Code) and for violating the rules on handling environmentally hazardous substances ( Art.247 of the Criminal Code ). The stolen "goods" were stored in a family-owned shed in the yard of a 12-apartment building on Studencheskaya Street in Dzerzhinsk. One of the 40-liter canisters of the poisonous liquid burst, and the "ethyl" spilled onto the dirt floor. A strong smell of gas was discovered in the last days of August, when people started searching for a gas leak! The first few days there was complete silence, including from the city's environmental protection agencies, and the deputy head of the Dzerzhinsk city department of environmental control ( formerly the nature-protection committee ) even took samples in shed No. 2 – the epicenter – without a gas mask (!). At a meeting of the city administration on September 9, a "brilliant" decision was made - to tear down 3 sheds (the shed where the TEL spill occurred - the epicenter, and two on either side of it), TEL concentrations in the sheds are given below. A residential building stands fifteen meters from the ill-fated sheds, a large bakery producing rye bread stands thirty meters away ( there, as at any facility, forced ventilation is in operation ), one of the EMERCOM training centers is located one hundred to one hundred twenty meters away, and one of the city's clinics is fifty meters away... It became known that in the shed where the TEL spill occurred, concentrations exceeded 7,000 times the average daily maximum permissible concentration and more than 17,500 times the single maximum permissible concentration for residential-area air. The city sanitary-epidemiological station (SES) accordingly found nothing on the first try - and indeed our valiant SES (which, incidentally, had recently marked its 80th anniversary) has no testing methods for TEL at all, it only has methods for lead, (but that is about as useful as determining the flour content of a loaf by weighing the whole loaf) yet the swabs taken by the SES nonetheless yielded ( guess what? ) naturally … a satisfactory result. The operation to dismantle the three sheds, (even though high TEL concentrations were found in many sheds) organized by the city's civil-defense and emergencies department, lasted more than eight hours. The sheds were dismantled by rescue workers. The disassembled structures, together with the belongings stored in them, as well as the soil from under the sheds, were hauled away and burned at around seven in the evening. Some of the goods, as we later learned, were sold off at the market by especially enterprising citizens (for reference: rubber is not resistant to tetraethyl lead, i.e. it (TEL) could easily have found its way into foodstuffs through the thin sealing rings on jars of pickles and other preserves; moreover, only a single shed – the source of the contamination – had actually been sealed off. The hazardous cargo was destroyed at the city dump. The site where the dismantled sheds had stood was covered with sand and treated with bleaching powder. |
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