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Severe cold wave hits eastern Russia

The Associated Press

MOSCOW (January 8, 2001 6:12 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - A cold wave severe even by Russians' hardy standards has set in over western Siberia and the Far East, sending temperatures plunging as low as minus 70 degrees, news media reported Saturday.

The temperature, a 30-year record, was recorded in the Kemerovo region about 1,800 miles east of Moscow, while temperatures in much of the rest of Russia east of the Ural Mountains were around minus 40.

The cold wave, which is expected to last several more days, has put a strain on Russia's power plants and heating stations, which often suffer from poor maintenance and slim fuel supplies.

In Barnaul, 180 miles west of Kemerovo, hospital patients were evacuated to sanitariums and other facilities outside the city because of poor heating supplies, the news agency ITAR-Tass said. There were no immediate reports of deaths due to the cold.

In many of the city's apartment blocks, elevators were turned off because of concerns that the low temperatures would cause the lifts' lubricants to freeze, the report said.

Orthodox Christmas Eve celebrations for children were postponed in the city, but in Omsk, temperatures of minus 40 didn't dissuade some people from recreation. More than 200 runners took part in the city's traditional Christmas Eve half-marathon race, the television network ORT reported.

http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500296928-500473262-503215174-0,00.html?printer

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 08, 2001

Answers

Families Shiver in Siberian Cold As Heating Systems Falter

MOSCOW, Jan 9, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Thousands of residents of the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Poligus were left without heating in temperatures as low as minus 57 degrees Celsius Monday following failures in power supply systems, Russian media reported.

Such cold waves are rare in Siberia, coming only every 10 to 15 years.

Around 2,000 inhabitants of a military cantonment in Novosibirsk found themselves in the cold following a break in gas supplies, many of them opting to transfer temporarily to the homes of relatives in neighboring districts, the RIA-Novosti agency said.

Others who chose to remain in their homes were warmed by stoves brought out of army warehouses.

A failure elsewhere in the city left 27 blocks of flats and a hospital without heating for several hours.

In Irkutsk, gas supplies to homes broke down several times, leaving families shivering while gas-flows were transferred along alternative routes.

At Poligus, where 57 degrees of frost were reported, a breakdown in the water-heating system forced residents to resort to emergency stoves for several hours while a boiler-house was repaired.

Last week, thousands of homes in Russia's Far East were also left without heat as temperatures fell in some areas to minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 Farenheit) in the harshest winter conditions in a decade.

The region would have survived the winter without problems if power plants had taken the necessary precautions and, in particular, built up their coal reserves ahead of the big freeze, officials said. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse)

http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=248075

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 10, 2001.