Smolny came to the panel

Security in St. Petersburg has been compromised. The reason is heavy snowfalls, which the city began to combat very late. It is noteworthy that an expert on St. Petersburg antiquity, Mikhail Pylyaev, author of the book “Old Petersburg” (the first edition was in 1889), warned one hundred and twenty years ago: “The weather in St. Petersburg does not tolerate carelessness.” This is exactly what the modern St. Petersburg authorities and services responsible for the condition of city streets did not take into account.

Officials decided to personally join the fight against the elements

Punishment - not with a whip, but with knitting
Last Friday evening (January 15) ended with a closed meeting of the operational headquarters for ensuring security in the city in Smolny: members of the government and heads of law enforcement agencies discussed the details of the snow and ice situation in St. Petersburg. As Novaya learned, not only the services involved in the condition of the streets, but also officials were given an order on Saturday, the 16th, not to neglect manual labor and to pick up shovels. And those higher up - vice-governors and chairmen of government committees - as city officials, inspect the city, divided into zones for clearing snow debris.
By special order, both utility service employees and office people actually came to the panel. Soldiers were also involved in the cleanup: to the places where the snow had to be shoveled, they marched in formation, carrying shovels instead of weapons.
By the way, Pylyaev in his book “Old Petersburg”, who, among other things, paid attention to a topic that is extremely relevant for modern Petersburg - the cleanliness of St. Petersburg streets, especially during heavy rains and snowfalls, which the northern capital is rich in due to the rotten climate, mentioned the punishments due to the perpetrators of “oversight”. “Some were exiled to eternal hard labor,” he wrote.
Today the retribution is not so severe. Inspecting the courtyards between Vladimirsky Prospekt and Rubinshteina Street on the 14th, the mayor threatened to doom the subordinates responsible for the city’s communal well-being to a “terrible” fate: “If the streets are not cleaned up by the first of February, they will go knitting socks.”

The shortage of cleared sites in St. Petersburg leads to the appearance of such advertisements

The horror of the coming melting
But cleaning with cleaning - the problem is where this snow is sent. They have already dumped rivers and canals onto the ice, so last year’s work to clean them up may turn out to be a monkey’s labor, dumping them in dirty snowdrifts on construction sites, vacant lots and even industrial zones.
Environmentalists remind us that sooner or later the snow tends to melt (apparently, this, as always, will come as a complete surprise to the city authorities). Muddy streams of melt water will pour into the storm drains, and from there into the river network. Moreover, not all storm water will end up at treatment facilities. Meanwhile, snow adsorbs almost the entire periodic table from the air of the city; the presence of a huge amount of organic and inorganic chemical compounds in the snow cover of roads is extremely dangerous for all living things.
All these troubles are facilitated by the main problem today: the city lacks a unified system for organizing work, monitoring and operational interaction of services. And the worst thing is that these services are ineffective, there are not enough people (since the beginning of January the number of so-called manual labor specialists in the city has been halved), and there is not enough equipment. Officials consider the use of snow melting machines to be too expensive (the question is, why did they buy them?); shovels are still the main production tool.
How can one not recall the wisdom of “Old Petersburg”: “In those days, those who transported dirt to the Neva, Moika or Fontanka were severely punished.” They also made sure that “no one of any rank along the small river Mye (Moika) and other small rivers and canals day and night, on horses, in sleighs and on horseback... did not travel at all, for the sake of the horse droppings littering these rivers and canals.” But in general, “the tsar’s decrees ordered that not only Nevsky, but also other city streets be kept in the greatest cleanliness...”

Evgenia DYLEVA
Photo by Mikhail MASLENNIKOV and Alexander KULEBYAKIN