Burst Pipes a Metaphor : Poland: A Country in Dilapidation

Down by the main railway station, a spectacular geyser of steam thunders 100 feet into the frosty air, enlivening an otherwise drab winter day. Lesser spouts scattered across the city provide warmth for stray cats and amusement for small children.

Almost as entertaining are the bubbling mudholes, like the one that has opened up at the end of Pilicka Street, in a well-to-do neighborhood of private homes at the south end of Warsaw. The steaming pit is about 10 feet wide, of indeterminate depth and filled with brown muddy water that burps and churns like the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park.

“This place is starting to look like Iceland,” a local resident observed as he peered into the pit.

Urban Heating

But these geysers and hot springs of Warsaw are man-made, not natural wonders. Like many other European cities, Warsaw is heated by power plants that pump superheated water to the radiator systems of homes, apartment buildings and offices. It is an energy-efficient approach to urban heating, as long as the water stays in the pipes.

But half of the 800 miles of hot-water pipes running under Warsaw’s streets are corroded, leaking and in need of urgent replacement. As with so many other things, Poland cannot afford to fix its urban plumbing system fast enough to keep up with the leaks.

Repair crews no sooner cap one ruptured pipe, such as the one that produced the towering geyser near the railroad station, when another opens up somewhere else.

“Once it was a privilege to live in Warsaw,” the often-outspoken, liberal-leaning weekly Polityka remarked some months ago. “Now it’s a nuisance: excavations, problems with the water supply, heating, public transportation. The city seems to be falling apart.”

Effect of Economic Crisis

So, to an alarming extent, is the rest of the country. The geysers of Warsaw are only the most visible sign of the growing dilapidation of Poland, the consequence of seven years of economic crisis.

Saddled with a $29-billion debt that is expected to cross the $30-billion mark this year as unpaid interest piles up, the Polish government is cutting corners wherever it can. Prominent among the corners are maintenance and repair.

With no major new Western credits on the horizon, and little money of its own, Polish industry is growing more obsolete by the month, state-owned housing is deteriorating and urgent repairs on the national infrastructure--from transportation to urban heating systems--are being put off until a better day, sometime in the next decade.

Many of these problems reflect years of neglect during the relatively prosperous 1970s, when the now-discredited regime of Edward Gierek squandered Poland’s borrowed billions on consumer goods and ill-planned industrial plants, some of which have never been finished. But now that the fruits of neglect have ripened, there seems to be little the state can afford to do.

The dilapidation of Poland shows up in myriad ways, among them the worsening state of public sanitation. After a decade of encouraging decline, official figures show a steady growth since 1980 in dysentery, viral hepatitis, salmonella and other forms of food poisoning. A contributing cause, according to health specialists, is the widespread breakdown of refrigeration units in stores and restaurants, and a lack of spare parts.

Air and water pollution on a grotesque scale add to the general decay. Less than half of Poland’s 800 towns and cities have sewage treatment of any kind--the two largest cities, Warsaw and Lodz, are among those that do not. In communities equipped with sewage plants, breakdowns are reportedly a worsening problem.

Heavy Industries’ Debris

While experts argue over whether Poland is the most polluted country in Europe, or merely one of the most polluted, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides belch virtually uncontrolled from the heavy industries of southern Poland, corroding buildings, dissolving clothing and driving the incidence of respiratory disease 30% above the national average.

Poland has just begun to tackle these problems, but pollution is not the greatest worry of state-owned industry. Gradually but inexorably, industry is wearing out.

Economists estimate that on the average nearly 60% of the life of the country’s industrial machinery has been used up. Breakdowns and industrial accidents are on the rise, energy consumption remains high and increasingly outdated industries find it harder and harder to produce goods that can compete in a world market that demands innovation and quality.

Last year, as an indication of this inability to compete, Poland’s trade surplus with Western countries fell 28%, partly as a result of declining exports of machinery and other engineered goods.

“It is as if we seriously hoped to drive into the 21st Century in a 1950s-vintage automobile,” a commentator in the Warsaw weekly Kierunki (Directions),” lamented last month. “Ramshackle (industrial) machines are becoming an increasing problem, and it will become even worse.”

Impressive Antiques

State-run industry in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is notorious for using equipment far beyond the point of obsolescence, but even by these standards, Poland’s collection of industrial antiques is impressive.

According to an internal government study last September, the majority of steel-industry equipment is outmoded, some of it dating to the 1930s and earlier. The average age of some steelmaking furnaces is 60 years, and nearly half the stamping equipment has been in use between 40 and 95 years.

Poland’s food industry is in no better shape. At least 30% of all milk, potatoes and fruit produced in the country spoil for lack of adequate storage or processing capacity. In the sugar refineries, half the boilers were built between 1913 and 1925. While the sugar is still flowing, the newspaper Zycie Warszawy said, frequent breakdowns are hazardous to workers and cause huge financial losses.

The meat industry has its own crisis. Even as Poland struggles to export meat and rations it at home, 20 state-owned packing plants have been shut down due to “poor technical condition.”

Altogether, economists estimate that the food industry needs 340 billion zlotys--$2 billion at the current exchange rate--by 1990, and another $30 million a year in hard currency, for the most urgently required imported machinery and spare parts. With the state budget running a deficit of 151 billion zlotys in 1986, little of this money is expected to be found.

Bus, Bridge Problems

In the meantime, Poland’s transportation system is also fraying. Breakdowns keep half of Warsaw’s buses out of commission, more than a third of the country’s railroad bridges need repairs, a lack of spare parts and maintenance contributed to a decline in truck transportation last year and the important Baltic port of Gdynia is literally falling apart.

Crumbling wharves, decaying warehouses and creaking cranes dating back to the 1930s make up a “sorrowful picture of everyday life in the ports,” as the newspaper Glos Wybrzeza (Voice of the Coast) put it in an interview with the harbor director, Hugon Malinowski.

One wharf has partially collapsed, six large warehouses are scheduled for demolition, chemical storage facilities have been written off as irreparable, and about half the port’s cargo-handling equipment is out of order on a typical day. For most Poles, the problems of deteriorating industry and commerce are little more than statistical abstractions. Tangible evidence of national dilapidation is closer at hand in the peeling paint, flaking concrete and corroded plumbing of the dreary blocks of public housing most city dwellers are obliged to call home.

Warsaw needs 90 billion zlotys ($530 million) for urgent repairs to its housing, according to Mayor Mieczyslaw Debicki. At the current rate of spending, the repairs will be completed in 16 years.

Entire Systems Needed

High on the list of priorities are the 2,000 buildings that require entirely new heating systems. “Given present supplies of such basic items as valves, pumps and above all radiators and pipes,” the newspaper Express Wieczorny reported last month, “the situation cannot be brought under control.”

Meanwhile, the capital’s entire technical infrastructure--water mains, sewers, telephones and especially the leaky urban heating system--is overburdened and in urgent need of modernization, according to Mayor Debicki, an army general.

In winter, demand for heat runs 25% ahead of Warsaw’s capacity to deliver it. “Nothing we’ve installed underground--especially the pipes--can sustain such a burden,” the mayor has observed. And indeed, on an average day, ruptures leave 20 to 50 buildings without heat, some of them housing hundreds of families.

To make matters worse, the system seems to be wearing out faster than repair crews can patch it up. With 430 miles of pipe in urgent need of replacement, crews manage to install no more than 30 miles a year, although this is seen as a big improvement over the seven-miles-a-year pace of a few years ago.

To many Poles, the leaky urban heating system provides a metaphor for 40 years of life under a Communist economy.

“Somehow,” Debicki observed to Polish journalists, in what appeared to be genuine perplexity, “the prewar pipes are OK. But the 10-year-old ones are already corroded, and the ones that are three years old are already cracking at the joints, their quality is so mediocre.”