Spill Lends a Barnyard Flavor to Russian City : Pollution: Farm dumps thousands of tons of cow manure into river supplying most of drinking water.

Anatoly Olosov woke up, washed his hands, sat down to breakfast and began to wonder where that awful stench was coming from.

“I smelled and tasted the food, and it was normal,” said Olosov, a 60-year-old pensioner. “Then I smelled my hands. And I thought, ‘Thank God I didn’t brush my teeth.’ ”

The city of Vladimir, a 12th-Century town that is a favorite site for pilgrims and tourists, has suffered an ecological accident of a most embarrassing kind: a massive spill of cow manure into the Nerl River, which supplies most of Vladimir with its drinking water.

A collective cattle farm upstream from Vladimir, unable to dispose of its manure, dumped about 120,000 tons of manure and water directly into the Nerl early last week, said Galina D. Minayeva, chief of the water resources department of the Vladimir Region Ecology Committee. Estimates vary as to how much manure was spilled, and some officials say they’ll never know the exact amount.

Within a day, the smell of the tap water was unspeakable. The city declared a state of emergency and organized convoys of milk and beer trucks to deliver clean water to kindergartens, schools and hospitals, said Deputy Mayor Vladimir P. Brashnikov.

By Saturday, the smell had mostly abated, but hundreds of city residents were still standing in line for up to five hours in a bitter cold to draw clean water from a city well.

On the ridge above them, the golden onion domes of Vladimir’s ancient cathedrals seemed to glow warmly in the icy mist. But the miserable people in line below were more preoccupied with their frozen feet. Old women and children trudged away lugging their heavy haul of clean water. Others strapped their bottles to luggage carts or dragged them home on children’s sleds.

City officials said Saturday that Nerl water, though foul smelling, is safe to drink. But the angry citizens in line for well water were not convinced.

“I came home, opened the tap in the kitchen, and immediately the whole place started to smell like a pigsty,” said Russian army Lt. Col. Vasily Donskov, 37, who had been in the water line for three hours and was still far from the wellhead. “We heard on the radio the instructions to boil the tap water. So we boiled it, and it stank even more.

“I just don’t trust the authorities any longer,” Donskov said. “I’d rather spend four hours or more here in the cold than have my kids drink that filth and be poisoned.”

Russians are painfully experienced in ecological calamity, from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident to this autumn’s huge oil spill in the Arctic region of Komi. Even so, a massive manure spill is a novelty, and some Vladimir residents managed to laugh about it--through clenched teeth.

The spill is not nearly as ecologically harmful as a chemical disaster would have been, and it did not kill many fish in the partly frozen Nerl, ecologist Minayeva said.

But it will worsen the already poor water quality in the Nerl and in the Klyazma River, which is fed by the Nerl and also supplies drinking water to the 370,000 residents of Vladimir, about 100 miles east of Moscow.

“The Klyazma runs through the Moscow region, which is one of the most industrial in Russia, before it comes here,” Minayeva said. “It runs past 13 sewage outlets before coming to our water-collection point.”

The Petrovsky collective farm and a nearby vodka factory have been polluting the Nerl with impunity for years, she said, and even before last week’s manure spill a third of all the water samples taken in Vladimir did not meet state water standards.

“The condition of the Nerl River is becoming worse and worse every year,” she said.

A plan to switch to underground water supplies was approved by the Soviet Council of Ministers in 1969, and construction on a pumping station began in 1983, but the project is still nowhere near completion, she said.

Meanwhile, the Vladimir prosecutor general has opened a criminal investigation of last week’s spill. It is still not clear whether the manure was dumped in the river out of stupidity or desperation, officials said.

The trail of the spill leads 63 miles up the Nerl River to the tiny village of Morozovo, where the Petrovsky collective farm has about 10,000 head of cattle and swine.

Ignoring complaints from the villagers, the farm has for years been dumping manure into a huge pond on the bank of the river that was originally built to hold fresh water. Only a simple floodgate separates the pond from the river, and villagers said anyone could have opened it easily.

The people of Morozovo have been protesting the manure dumping for years, but to no avail. In summertime the stench is unbearable, and whenever the level of the pond rises, the water in Morozovo’s drinking wells begins to smell foul, said Lyudmilla I. Savelyeva, 42, the leader of the village of 400 families.

Vladimir officials said they had been told that the cash-strapped Petrovsky farm simply could not afford the gasoline to run the trucks that should have removed the manure from the pond and spread it on the fields.

But Savelyeva charged that the collective farm had allowed the manure to build up even when cheap gasoline was available.

“It’s easier for them to dump it into the river than take it away,” she said. “We can’t understand why they keep doing it.”

Collective farm offices were closed Saturday, and officials could not be reached for comment.

Vladimir officials said the river water that supplies their city will improve within a few days. But Savelyeva said Morozovo’s wells still smell, even after she dosed them with chlorine. She believes that the water poses a health hazard but said authorities have ignored her pleas for help.

“We have nowhere else to go to get clean water,” she said.