Low lifespan in a pollution-choked capital

Press, 7 September 1989, Page 13

Low lifespan in a pollution-choked capital

IN MOSCOW

Patricia Legras

Vladimir Ivanovich Shishlin has a room with a view — a view of a vast “unofficial” rubbish tip: old car tyres, slabs of concrete, broken bottles and fluorescent lamps, tins and rotting food, but also deposits of mercury, and “forgotten” containers of radioactive isotopes. He lives in the suburbs of Moscow, in an ordinary housing development of 20-storey blocks of flats. He remembers the time when the dump outside his windows was a pond, and the nightingales sang in the spring. But that was some years ago, and now Moscow is among the top 20 polluted cities in the Soviet Union, rated as “dangerous” to live in. Its factories and chemical plants, its lorries and buses belching out black acrid smoke, have turned it into an ecological nightmare. Untreated waste threatens the water sup-

plies, and only a third of the industrial plants have any filters. Vladimir Shishlin’s small grandson is always ill — “something wrong with his lungs.”

Statistics show that between 1977 and 1985 the number of children suffering from bronchial problems rose 750 per cent. Those living near the inner ring road, permanently blocked by decrepit lorries, are six times more likely to fall sick than those elsewhere. Adults are also affected, to the point that the average lifespan in Moscow has fallen to , 65 years, one of the lowest in Europe, according to scientists at Moscow University. Even in the rest of the Soviet Union as a whole, taking into account the’ most backward spots, the average is several years higher than this. A doctor speaking on television has advised Muscovites not to go jogging in town, since they will breathe in more poisons than ever. And Moscow radio has announced that certain beaches on the riverbank are unsafe for bathing — a popular

week-end pastime especially during a summer as hot as this one.

Each time I return to the Soviet capital I am hit by the smell of poor-quality petrol and factory fumes. I sometimes feel I am going to be asphyxiated when driving round the rihg road, especially behind a lorry changing gear and accelerating.

Dust covers tables and books

Criticism of

city’s scientists

Amazingly, the police appear to do little about all the traffic pouring out exhaust fumes, which specialists say are responsible for 70 per cent of the city’s pollution. Probably if tests were made similar'to those in the West, most vehicles would

have to be taken off the roads. If I leave a window open in my flat, dust covers tables and books in a few hours. Inconvenient, perhaps, but the daily newspaper “Trud” (“Work”) reports that this is not just ordinary dust. It contains arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, borium, selenium, zinc... all health hazards.

In some regions of the city, where half a ton of dust falls on a square kilometre per day, the amounts of cadmium are 60 times above the danger level, lead is 14 times too much, and zinc 26 times too high for safety. Children playing in sandpits, and who are small in any case, breathe the most polluted air in the streets, and suffer most from these heavy metal deposits. The newspaper made two maps of the city, one showing where there were most illnesses and the other showing where

pollution was highest. The two coincide perfectly. Vicious tongues point out that the “nomenklatura” live in the cleanest areas.

Allergies are common among children, and Russian friends often ask for special ointments from abroad, unavailable here. There are said to be high percentages of deformed babies born in some regions on the outskirts of the capital, in new housing developments built near dangerous chemical factories. As the city expanded over the last 20 years, tips of industrial waste were levelled out and blocks of flats built on top. No-one checked what was in the tips. There have been several scares recently that some were radioactive.

The city authorities appear to be helpless. At a recent session of the city council, the Mayor

himself pointed out that he had no power to close down polluting factories. Fourteen hundred such enterprises have been registered simply poisoning the air, not counting those which pour toxins into the river.

According to Mayor Saikin, the State Ministries have priority and can refuse to close their factories down.

He is also angry with the country’s scientists. According to him, a third of all Soviet specialists live and work in Moscow, and yet their contribution to ecology is “practically nil.” No research centre, said Saikin, would accept the contract

the city offered to study techniques to neutralise nitrous oxides. Nor will “secret” establishments tell the city council what products they are ejecting into the atmosphere. The latest statistics show that more than 3.5 million of Moscow’s 8M inhabitants, or nearly a half, live in a “situation of discomfort.” For nearly a million this situation is “extreme." Since I live in a block of flats just off the inner ring road, and next to three train stations in an industrial area, I fear I could be among the latter million. Perhaps living on the tenth floor reduces some of the dangers. If nothing is done in the near future, says Mayor Saikin, Moscow will simply choke to death. He needs a billion roubles (S3B) quickly, but it is difficult to see where that could come from in the present economic situation.