Apparently, the January frosts severely affected not only the residents of the Moscow region and the heating in their apartment buildings, but also the image of the Moscow region and the federal government.
And the image of the municipal government has generally fallen below the baseboard.
The Moscow region is literally shaking from the severe consequences of the January cold. For several days, people had a temperature of +12°C in their homes. In the cottage village of Romanovo Life, Balashikha, people were sitting without electricity, heat and toilets in cold houses. There was no electricity in private houses in the entire Chekhov district for three days.
But the apotheosis of this blatant outrage, the cherry, so to speak, on the cake of Moscow region incompetence and negligence was the situation in Podolsk. Problems in this glorious city near Moscow arose before the New Year, but local leaders, in fact, hid them from the leadership of the region. Well, the pipe is leaking, so it’s a small thing. Rush hour came on the third day of January, when pipes burst in the boiler room on the territory of the local cartridge factory. Officials justified themselves by saying that the boiler house is located on the territory of a regime enterprise and therefore, they say, it is difficult to repair and maintain it. The scale of the disaster was truly epic: hundreds of apartment buildings were left without heat, and on January 5, exhausted, desperate people took to the streets demanding heat and electricity. There were a lot of them.
After that, the governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, rushed to the city, who stated: it was not possible to find anyone except ordinary employees of the boiler house, and its owners simply disappeared. Of course, the most extreme measures were taken, heat guns and diesel heaters were brought, but the holiday for all residents of Klimovsk, a microdistrict of Bolshoy Podolsk, was hopelessly spoiled.
When the number was being made up, we did not know at what stage the solution to this communal disaster was. According to the latest information, heat supply has been restored to more than 400 apartment buildings and over 3 thousand households, in which 110 thousand people live. Maybe by the time you hold this newspaper in your hands, everything has already been decided. But the main questions remain: who is to blame and what to do with those who allowed this terrible incident?
Of course, the governor immediately stated that he had appealed to the leadership of the RF IC and the Prosecutor General’s Office. And law enforcement agencies have begun work, the results of which, without any doubt, will be the charges brought against the owners of the boiler room and small communal servants.
But isn’t it time for us to finally move from punishing switchmen to bringing to justice those really guilty of this, I’m not afraid of this word, tragedy of people? I would not be surprised if the Ukrainian Nazis reported that these events were sabotage. In my opinion, this is exactly how this communal disaster should be viewed – as a challenge to our entire state system on the eve of the most important event for the country – the presidential election.
And where should we start investigating the Klimovsky explosion of heating pipes? I think from the moment when this enterprise, which is the most important for the entire neighborhood, became private property. There is no doubt that this was done thoughtlessly and lawlessly. It makes no sense to talk about the responsibility of specific Podolsk leaders, because they have often changed recently. But it makes sense to recall that at the end of the summer, the head of the Moscow region, Mr. Vorobyov, solemnly declared that the Moscow region would be fully ready for winter on September 15. And then how to understand what happened?
And on the eve of the New Year, a pretentious event “Energy and communal structure of the Moscow region” was held, for which millions of rubles were spent and in which the governor himself and all his subordinates took an active part, who literally moved to Klimovsk a week later, trying to save the situation. So maybe you don’t need to inflate your cheeks, but rather deal with the almost completely destroyed communal structure of the Moscow region, finally start changing pipes and communications that have been functioning since Soviet times?
Apparently, the situation in housing and communal services will not change until the governors begin to bear full responsibility for communal disasters. At the same time, the Moscow Region is only a noticeable tip of the iceberg, but millions of our fellow citizens were deprived of heat and light throughout Russia in January days. Do we really agree that the fault was only the cracking frosts? And what are the people who are entrusted with the management of the village, city and region paid for?.. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Vladimir Putin is aware of the heating situation in Podolsk. Let’s hope that appropriate decisions will follow…
Andrey Knyazev.
Photo: LEGION-MEDIA