Sewage Crisis Has Ukrainian City Urging People to Leave : Pollution: The mayor of Kharkiv warns of ‘bacterial danger.’ Residents are encouraged to take vacations.

Officials of the second-largest Ukrainian city shut off all running water Thursday to try draining a flooded sewage system and appealed to residents to leave town, if they can.

“The bacterial danger is real,” Mayor Yevhen Kusharov warned television viewers. “Please, take a vacation for a while, take your children to visit their grandparents.”

The flooding began June 29 when a two-hour cloudburst dumped more than an inch of rain on this city in eastern Ukraine. More than 100 million cubic feet of excrement has since flowed from the backed-up central sewage system into the Udy, Lopan and Kharkiv rivers, transforming them into virulent soups of salmonella, dysentery, hepatitis and cholera.

The sewage disaster has set an epidemiological time bomb under this city of 1.5 million people. It has also provided another example of the dangerous legacy of the slipshod Soviet planning that frightened the world when the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in 1986 and that wiped the Russian oil town of Neftegorsk off the map when an earthquake struck earlier this year.

“It’s a result of the same thinking,” said Environment Minister Yuri Kostenko after inspecting the damage in Kharkiv. “No one believed that a calamity could happen, and so they didn’t plan for it.”

Neftegorsk’s flimsy buildings were not built to withstand the earthquake that killed hundreds, although the Russian Far East is known to be a seismically active zone. Chernobyl’s designers failed to build a reinforced concrete covering to contain explosions.

Kharkiv’s civil engineers designed a sewer system that saved energy by letting gravity pull the waste down to a vast centralized reservoir 130 feet underground. But planners never considered the kind of deluge that overflowed the reservoir and flooded the electric-powered pumps in just eight minutes. Now, the damaged pumps, which are 13 stories underground, are flooded under almost 100 feet of raw sewage.

“We still don’t know what’s happening down there,” said Yukhim Klein, director of city utilities.

While 15 divers from the Ukrainian navy have the repulsive task of exploring the upper reaches of the excrement-flooded station, the city is collecting an international arsenal of pumps to drain it.

The city had 14 pumps working Monday and 25 by Thursday. Officials said they were expecting seven more pumps from the Netherlands before they start draining the station tonight.

Although Kharkiv’s supply of drinking water is unaffected by the disaster, officials turned off the taps for a week on July 6 when they first tried to drain the station. When that effort failed, they turned the taps back on but imposed water rationing to reduce the flow into the rivers.

Some Kharkiv residents have heeded their mayor’s call and left the city, while others have sent their children to stay with relatives.

But Laryssa Bilotserkovets’ business selling chocolate and chewing gum kept her in the city. “I’m filling up everything I can at home, bottles, pails, pots, the bathtub,” said the 31-year-old merchant, who was collecting spring water in a forested park.

Although officials said the water will be turned off for three days, she was dubious. “That’s what they said last time, and we didn’t have water for a week.”

Since water rationing began, Bilotserkovets has only had running water between 5 and 6 a.m. “It’s greasy, though,” she said, rubbing her fingers with distaste. “You don’t feel clean when you use it.”

The price of keeping the city supplied with a trickle of running water has been to kill the rivers. Although the rationing has drastically reduced the sewage outflow, more than 4 million cubic feet of untreated waste still pours into the rivers daily.

“Everything alive is dying,” said Anatoly Plaviuk, an Environment Ministry trouble-shooter. To replenish the rivers’ oxygen levels, down to less than 10% of that needed to sustain fish life, 44 compressor trucks are scattered around the city bubbling air into the murky waters.

Special waste-eating bacteria are also being used to begin cleaning the rivers, especially the Udy, which flows into the Siverny Donets--the main water supply for the densely populated Luhansk and Donetske regions.

But Kharkiv’s own rivers are a public health disaster waiting to happen. Signs of cholera were found in the Udy and Lopan rivers last week. And more than 260 people in southern Ukraine have contracted the potentially fatal intestinal disease, which is only rarely seen in developed countries.

Kharkiv officials insist that there have been no cholera cases in their city--yet. “But experts say that the health effects of the sewage in the rivers will only be seen in about a month,” the mayor told TV viewers. “Stay away from the rivers!”