It’s Colder Than Siberia--Even in Siberia

It’s enough to make California electricity customers count their blessings.

Across the Pacific Ocean in the Russian Far East, Olga Korolyova is troubled by blackouts. But unlike her counterparts in California, it’s not the darkness that she fears, or even her electric bill. It’s the cold.

Since December, the temperature has hovered around minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit--cold even by Siberian standards. Little or no heat comes from Korolyova’s radiators. She and her husband survive in the feeble warmth of two electric heaters--all they can plug in without blowing a fuse.

To cook, they have to turn off one of the heaters. Several times a day, they decide between eating and staying warm.

“It gets so cold while the water is heating that a few hours later, when you have to decide again between boiling water and keeping both heaters plugged in, you always choose in favor of the heaters,” Korolyova said this week by telephone.

Across most of Russia, from the Pacific Coast through Siberia to the Urals, temperatures have plunged to minus-40, minus-50, even minus-70.

That would be tough enough, but it gets worse. The deep freeze has conspired with fragile infrastructure and poor energy supplies to leave millions struggling to survive with intermittent heat and electricity--if there’s any.

The energy crisis is so dire that it triggered a tongue-lashing Friday by President Vladimir V. Putin, who accused regional officials of “condemning the population to death.”

“The deep cold is not an acceptable excuse,” Putin scolded as he called an emergency meeting in the Kremlin. “Where are the resources, the reserves, the backup plans? No one is taking concrete, personal responsibility for this situation.”

The “situation” varies building by building, town by town, and region by region, but the fundamentals are similar everywhere. The temperature drops. Heating and water pipes freeze and burst. Residents resort to electric heaters, which overtax the electric system already operating at only partial capacity because of fuel shortages. Fuses blow. Temperatures inside drop lower. More pipes freeze.

Korolyova, 51, is one of 12,000 residents of the mining town of Novoshakhtinsky, about 60 miles north of the port of Vladivostok. The temperature in the room with the heaters is just above freezing. The temperature elsewhere in the apartment is so low, the thermometer has frozen.

“It’s inexplicably cold here--even your face muscles get numb and you begin to talk funny,” she said. “You can’t go to the toilet properly. All the pipes and sewer lines are frozen. So we use a bucket . . . and then take it outside before it freezes.”

The cold wave has been caused by a “hyper-developed” Siberian high-pressure system that has brought crystal-clear skies with nary a cloud to help trap the faint warmth that emanates from the earth.

As a result, some regions have experienced record low temperatures: minus-67 in parts of the central Siberian region of Irkutsk, the lowest recorded temperature there in a century, and minus-71 in the western Siberian region of Kemerovo, a 70-year low.

But the main problem, according to Roman Vilfand, deputy director of Russia’s national weather service, is how long the cold snap has lasted.

“This has been the longest cold wave in eastern Siberia in the last 80 years,” Vilfand said. “If the cold had lasted for just a week, there would have been no problems. But after three weeks, disasters began to pile up in one town after another as the boiler houses were unable to cope with the load and energy resources were running low.”

This country is particularly vulnerable to outages because many Russians, especially those living in apartment blocks, get their heat and hot water pumped from a municipal boiler house. When a pipe bursts, entire neighborhoods can go cold.

Mikhail Tsedrik, a spokesman for the DalEnergo electric company, which supplies Novoshakhtinsky, said the system is a remnant of the Communist era, when people lived in mass-produced apartments and consumed mass-produced utilities, essentially at no cost.

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that the root of all these power failures, blackouts and frozen pipes is that we are still getting over the Soviet legacy, which has proven very tenacious,” Tsedrik said by telephone from his office in Vladivostok. “It never occurred to those who planned and built the infrastructure that heating and energy may cost money.”

Those who live in old-fashioned wooden cottages are better off because they tend to have wood-burning stoves. But two-thirds of Novoshakhtinsky’s residents live in more modern, concrete-panel apartment blocks constructed in the last 40 years, and they are all but helpless when the city utilities fail.

“There’s not a single place you can go to get warm,” said 41-year-old Vera Zarudayeva, Korolyova’s neighbor. “A human being can get used to anything--to shortages of food, to high temperatures, to wind. The only thing that’s impossible to get used to is cold.”

Life in a subzero apartment poses severe challenges to basic human survival. Zarudayeva can’t wash dishes, so she and her husband heat cans of meat directly on an electric coil, then eat straight from the can.

They go to bed fully dressed in hats and layers of wool, burrowed under several down quilts, struggling to keep a passage open to breathe. They collect drinking water in buckets from a tanker that comes by once a day. They keep the buckets as close as possible to the heaters, but sometimes the water freezes anyway and they hew off chunks with a knife to make tea.

Zarudayeva hasn’t been able to bathe in weeks, not even at the city banya, or bathhouse, which is without power.

“All we manage to do is to wash the essential parts of the body very quickly in order to prevent ourselves from becoming animals,” she said.

Throughout the region, frostbite has become endemic. During the first week in January, hospitals in Kemerovo reported 500 cases. Frostbite-related amputations in Irkutsk are averaging three a day. Burns also are on the rise as residents jury-rig gas and kerosene stoves. Such efforts led to two gas explosions in the cities of Biysk and Novosibirsk that left at least six dead.

More than 50 frozen corpses have been collected off the streets of Irkutsk, although authorities have yet to determine what role the cold might have played in the deaths.

Nearly everywhere, schools have been shut and public transportation curtailed. In recent days, hundreds of Vladivostok residents have held street protests to demand that local officials be held accountable for the outages. In many regions, law enforcement agencies have opened criminal investigations of energy and utility officials.

“We are freezing to death while our top-ranking administrators are lining their pockets,” Zarudayeva complained. “They have been pocketing the money that was supposed to finance the maintenance of the town’s utilities. And today we see the results.”

The lack of heat particularly grates in Novoshakhtinsky, where most residents are coal miners. If they had their own stoves, they could easily heat their homes with the coal they carve each day from the earth.

“The situation is ridiculous and paradoxical,” said Tsedrik, the electric company spokesman. “The region is sitting on its own coal and freezing to death.”

Natalya Klimenko, Zarudayeva’s neighbor, finds the situation particularly humiliating. Her husband is still going to work each day in the mines.

“When our husbands come back from working in the strip, they have no hot water to wash the coal dust off their hands and faces,” she said. “Sometimes, they even have to go to bed like that, with their faces all black.”

Weather forecasts are promising a slight warming in coming days--as high as minus-5, in some places. But Siberians and Far Easterners still without heat will take little pleasure in the relatively balmy weather.

“You can’t compare this life to anything,” Korolyova said. “It’s not like camping, because when you camp, you derive pleasure from hardships. Nor is it like a prison, because in a prison, the warden has to pay at least some attention to the inmates, and there is usually heating. Our life is more like a research lab--our government is testing our strength, trying to find our breaking point.”

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.