The case is a pipe

The head of Mosvodokanal named the reasons for winter accidents

After the scolding that Yuri Luzhkov recently gave to the heads of city services for unsatisfactory work during the winter period, the head of Mosvodokanal, Stanislav Khramenkov, was the first to attempt to rehabilitate himself. At yesterday's press conference, he made it clear that the "radical failure" of his department, as stated by the mayor at the last meeting of the capital's government, was an exaggeration.

True, Mr. Khramenkov admitted that “this winter the number of emergency reports of interruptions in water supply to residential and administrative buildings due to freezing of water supply lines has increased 19 times.” In total, Mosvodokanal received 282 complaints, however, according to the head of the enterprise, this was not caused by the poor work of his subordinates. This winter, with its record-breaking frosts, has demonstrated “the discrepancy between the current standards for laying water pipes and the actual climatic conditions in Moscow,” Mr. Khramenkov said. Noting that during severe frosts, most of the pipelines found themselves in the zone of soil freezing, which in some areas reached a depth of two meters, he emphasized: even under these conditions, there were no interruptions in water supply throughout the city. “If the water was turned off, the shutdown time did not exceed four hours,” said the head of Mosvodokanal, confident that there are not many cases of pipe ruptures in the capital. The most famous accident of last winter on the Mozhaisk Highway, as a result of which the government highway was under a two-meter layer of water, Mr. Khramenkov generally called “an ordinary case.” Explaining that the pipes in this place were made of low-quality reinforced concrete, the head of Mosvodokanal reassured the assembled journalists, saying that “it was a normal pipe rupture.”

In general, all winter accidents, according to Stanislav Khramenkov, should not be blamed on Mosvodokanal workers, but solely on the quality of the pipelines. “Reinforced concrete pipes do not stand up to criticism,” he said. And only those pipes that were laid before the revolution, or at least before the Great Patriotic War, “feel quite good” in Moscow. Nostalgic for pre-revolutionary quality, the head of Mosvodokanal cited the example of cast iron water pipes laid along Pyatnitskaya Street in 1883.

Alexander GUDKOV