The cup is overflowing
“Somewhere it is better, somewhere it is very bad,” Ramil Absalikov, a resident of the village of Bazhov, tells RG. “But 80 percent of the population suffered.” In my vegetable pit in spring, the water rose by 40 centimeters, now the level has exceeded two meters. No matter how much you mine it, I think it comes back out of the old quarry of mine number 45. Once upon a time coal was mined in the open pit, then it was abandoned and the quarry began to fill with water, but this year “the cup overflowed.”
The outskirts of the town are the most flooded: Kaslinskaya, Ilmenskaya, Angarskaya, Bratskaya, Izhevskaya, Karaganda, Yemanzhelinskaya, Moskovskaya streets and others. In recent years, the sun-scorched steppe around Bazhov has been covered with a series of large and small lakes, very close to homes. The reason for this is abandoned and not properly maintained mines. People believe that after the “zealous” owners saved money on their reclamation, groundwater gradually rose into the mine shafts and now threatens to pay the people in full.
Historically, Kopeisk and the scattered towns around it, built directly next to coal mines, stand on very unstable terrain. There used to be a lot of swamps here. As the mines were built and moved underground, water was pumped out and filled an artificial lake, Kurochkino, near the city. The depth of the excavations, depending on the presence of coal seams, ranges between 200 meters and half a kilometer. The entire underground space is dotted with tunnel holes and tunnels and is more reminiscent of Dutch cheese, corroded by water returning to the mines.
The frogs have multiplied
After the closure of Chelyabinskugol in the early 2000s, its successor, the Chelyabinsk Coal Company, had to suspend the troubled economy. But she didn’t live up to expectations either. He removed assets that were liquid at the time from the company and removed expensive equipment from underground, including equipment for pumping groundwater. And she left everything as it was. According to the law, the license to use the subsoil can only be revoked after completing all work to recover the objects, but the company managed to circumvent this requirement by going through bankruptcy proceedings. The mines began to sink: this is physics, the law of communicating vessels: water from underground mines comes to the surface. Unexpected ground failures followed and flooding of Kopey residents’ basements and vegetable gardens became commonplace.
– But this year can’t even be compared with previous years! – says Tatyana Dymshakova, a resident of Krylova Street. “We have lived here for 26 years and it has never happened before that the lake overflowed by six meters at a time. There is water under the floors, the foundation will begin to collapse with the first frost. Below us, people on the streets act on their own: they bought motor pumps, connected hoses, but we have nowhere to go: there are neighbors around and there is a road nearby, you can’t pull hoses through it. So we walked all summer in wellies, the trees died, you see, there are no leaves. Of the plants, only the iris survived in water. Frogs and leeches have multiplied, at least take them to the pharmacy!
According to Tatyana, the authorities are aware of the problem, they paid the victims 20 thousand rubles per person in connection with the emergency, but they do not help to draw water on private farms. The rescue of drowning people is the work of the drowning people themselves. Well, at least they allowed people to pump it themselves, into the city sewer system. By autumn, the flood level had decreased, albeit by a few centimeters.
“The authorities are waiting for a Belgorod water reduction project,” Tatyana shows her knowledge. – They promised it would be for June 1. Now they say: for December. But some of the experts’ recommendations are still being implemented: they are going to divert water from the quarry of mine number 45 into a canal to Lake Kurlady. Better yet, winter is right around the corner! And so… all summer they pump, pour, as if from glass to glass, it is not clear why…
Pound of water in a mortar.
Tatyana Makarova, a resident of the village of Second Uchastok, located a few kilometers away, also expressed doubts that the authorities could control the situation. According to her, the water reaches them by gravity from a fire tank, which is located in the balance of the city. And this year the street was so flooded that the residents of three houses were left in it, and even then one was left half burned due to a short circuit. At the same time, a kind of nonsense arises when pumping water. We arrived and worked for five days until they began to heat the houses on the other side. And three days later the lake level rose again.
“Since spring we have been knee-deep in water,” says Tatyana. – It looks like everything in the house is damp, including the wiring. We spent the summer in a rented apartment; After the birth of our second child, our daughter did not want to return here. Where should we go? Children need to go to school. It is true that the authorities are now deciding on the issue of the house: if they consider it unsafe, they will move it.
At the last staff meeting held in the Kopeisk mayor’s office, special attention was paid to the problem of water reduction. In particular, they said that the drainage of water from the quarry of mine No. 45 near the village of Bazhova is carried out by a pumping station of a contracting organization (but in 2024 they will buy their own, more powerful one, the administration promised) . . Meanwhile, on Angarskaya and Kaslinskaya streets, on the outskirts of the village, they decided to combat the flood with the help of motor pumps, which residents have been doing all summer with varying success.
In addition, officials discussed measures to lower the level of Lake Sineglazovo and the quarry of the former Krasnaya Gornyachka mine, where, according to the initiative group, the water fell 50 centimeters below the red mark. Khalturina, Central and Tenistaya streets in Kopeisk itself are also in the sights of the authorities.
“For each street, the heads of territorial departments and I need information every day to be able to control the situation, deadlines and quality of work being done,” warned Kopeysk director Svetlana Loganova.
The ONF regional headquarters considers that using local measures is like pouring water into a mortar. It is necessary to find a comprehensive solution in cooperation with the federal center.
“This is an issue at the level of the head of the region,” explained the ONF. – We sent an appeal to the governor asking him to organize the work of liquidating the mines in the entire coal basin, solving the problem once and for all.
Help “RG”
The Chelyabinsk coal basin included more than a dozen mines, the largest being Krasnaya Gornyachka, Tsentralnaya, Komsomolskaya, Kapitalnaya and the Kopeysky open pit mine. The only one that was closed at the expense of the federal budget with the implementation of all necessary measures was “Krasnaya Gornyachka”. Despite this, several villages adjacent to the mine (Gornyak, RMZ, Novostroika) suffered serious flooding and sinkholes formed.
The Tsentralnaya mine and the Kopeysky open pit mine have common mining fields and hydraulic connections. The influx of groundwater into “Central” at the time of closure was about 250 cubic meters per hour. The Kapitalnaya and Komsomolskaya mines were also suspended by the “wet” method. According to the results of hydrogeological monitoring, the complete flooding of Kapitalnaya should have occurred at a level of 170 meters, with a surface level of 200, but the Chelyabinsk Coal Company did not complete its conservation due to the revocation of the license. The water rise in Komsomolskaya was predicted to reach 210 meters at a surface level of 200 to 216 meters. In 2009, both facilities were removed from the state registry of hazardous production facilities. Since then, no land reclamation has been carried out, which causes the appearance of spontaneous reservoirs and the flooding of the village of Bazhova.
In total, according to 2019 data, it was necessary to relocate 1,234 residential buildings with a total area of 79.2 thousand square meters from areas located within the boundaries of potentially dangerous areas.
When the number was written
The Ministry of Public Security of the Chelyabinsk region received a response to RG’s request:
“A snowy winter and a rainy summer led to a rise in groundwater this year (a state of emergency was declared in the city district. At the same time, the problem of flooding in the Kopeisk city district is under constant government control). government of the Chelyabinsk region, was also considered at the federal level. Thus, in 2020, a contract was concluded between the Russian Ministry of Energy and the Siberian Geotechnical Research Institute to forecast the development of the hydrogeological situation. of inactive mines and open pit mines with the development of a concept for an optimal water reduction scheme and measures to prevent flooding. In 2023, Governor Alexey Teksler ordered the development of a unified water reduction project for the Kopeisk urban district. It has entered into a municipal contract with the All-Russian Research Institute for drainage of mineral deposits, protection of engineering structures from water, special mining operations, geomechanics, geophysics, hydraulic engineering, geology and topography (Belgorod). the necessary surveys. The project should be ready by the end of 2024.”
