UKRAINE: People in villages of Donbass mining region say Soviet-era toxic slag heap is damaging health

Record ID: 803427

  • Title: UKRAINE: People in villages of Donbass mining region say Soviet-era toxic slag heap is damaging health
  • Date: 18th November 2010
  • Summary: GORLOVKA, NEAR DONETSK UKRAINE (RECENT) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF LANDSCAPE WITH SLAG HEAPS VISIBLE ON HORIZON DZERZHINSK, NEAR DONETSK, UKRAINE (RECENT) (REUTERS) GOODS TRAIN MOVING NEAR SLAG HEAPS VARIOUS OF SLAG HEAPS WITH SCORCH MARKS VARIOUS OLD MINE '1965 MINE IZOTOVA' 27-YEAR-OLD YELENA PUSHING HER 11-MONTH-OLD SON YEVGENY ALONG STREET PAST SLAG HEAP (SOUNDBITE (Russian ) YELENA, RESIDENT OF DZERZHINSK AND MOTHER OF 11-MONTH-OLD YEVGENY, SAYING: "It's very dirty, the child has started to get allergies"
  • Embargoed: 3rd December 2010 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Ukraine
  • Country: Ukraine
  • Topics: Environment / Natural World,Energy
  • Reuters ID: LVA2Z8FKO8HA0MHBDCB352XY6DX7
  • Story Text: The skyline around Ukraine's eastern city of Donetsk is dominated by massive slag heaps, the legacy of Soviet -era coalmines now long abandoned. Their toxic legacy though is felt to this day by villagers still living in the region.
    Donetsk is the capital of the Donbass region, Ukraine's industrial heartland. During the Soviet era, the Donbass was one of the most important coal-producing regions in the USSR, and the area is dotted with mines, some dating back as far as the 1930s.
    The number of working mines has declined sharply since 1988, when the Soviet coal industry reached its peak output and many mines in Donbass have closed.
    Since the closures little or nothing has been done to clean up the coal waste and the slag heaps have remained long since the last miners came off their last shift underground.
    The area around Donetsk still has an estimated 600 slag heaps, the result of decades of coal mining. Of these slag heaps, a number are constantly burning. Local authorities lack the funds to extinguish the fires.
    In the village of Dzerzhinsk, the 'Izotova ' mine, founded in 1965, is now abandoned. Twenty-seven year-old Yelena pushes her young son Yevgeny through a desolate post-industrial landscape.
    Yelena's husband works as a security guard for the local administration, her father-in-law was a miner in the 'Izotova' pit. The heaps give off dust and their coal waste regularly catches fire and smoulders, sending out clouds of smoke.
    "It's very dirty, the child has started to get allergies," said Yelena, before setting off towards the village, navigating her way past the smoking waste.
    In the village of Gorlovka, the 'Lenin' mine is still working. Still bearing the name of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, the mine also uses Soviet-era methods of disposing of coal waste.
    Trucks load up the slag at the pit head and drive a short way through the village to the slag heaps. Former mine worker Anya, now in her mid 40s, no longer has her job at the pit, but says she feels her health has suffered from living near the slag heaps.
    "Actually my teeth are falling out and my eyes aren't too good at all and I have back trouble. It's as stiff as a board - we don't know if it's the slag heap that's done it, we don't know," said Anya, talking outside her modest home built by the pyramid-shaped mountains of coal waste.
    For some village residents the slag heaps are a way of making money in an area where few new jobs have been created to replace those lost in the declining mining industry.
    The heaps have become a huge rubbish dump as locals and people from further afield illegally dispose of unwanted trash there.
    For Andrei it offers the chance to find items he might be able to use and sell, to supplement his meagre pension.
    "Look here, there's some wood here in the rubbish," he said, picking through the slag. At the end of a day's forging Andrei straps his new-found articles onto his old bicycle before riding back to his house in the village.
    It could be a dangerous occupation for Andrei as the slag heaps contains toxic chemicals.
    Huge mountains of toxic coal waste also loom over the main highway running between Donetsk and the town of Makeeva.
    "If we want to talk about the places where the water and the air are most polluted with the most toxic materials - sulphur, magnesium, cadmite - it is the places where there are the slag heaps," said Vladimir Berezin, Director of the 'Bakhmut' Ecological and Cultural centre of Artemivsk, near Donetsk.
    The centre is named after the river 'Bakhmut' which runs through the Donbass region.
    "This source of pollution, these slag heaps, they are continuing to destroy life around them, including the lives of people," added Berezin.
    Donetsk city officials admit the ecological problems posed by the slag heaps and are looking towards the example of western Europe where former coal-mining areas have been transformed into green belts through tree-planting programmes.
    "A slag heap is a mini volcano, but to say a tragedy may or may not occur - well, anything could happen - if one lives life expecting disaster, this is not right. I would like to underline the fact that the slag heaps are a problem but the Donbass is not to blame, it's the tragedy of Donbass. But this can be used for positive ends, by using the slag heaps as a location for tree-planting," said Sergei Tretyakov, who heads the Rural Protection Department in the regional administration in Donetsk.
    Back in Gorlovoka, under the shadow of the slag heaps people are getting on with their lives. Former miner Alexander Khvorostyan carries out the last tasks in his garden before the onset of winter: collecting fruit and tying up his vine.
    Khvorostyan, who was named a 'Hero of Socialist Labour' when he worked at the mine, now fears its legacy.
    "Here at the dump and in the old mine there is gas and there is also radiation, it's just that no-one tells us anything," he said, looking through the bare trees of his hedge to where the mountain of coal waste is a constant and forbidding presence.
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