Housing and communal services disasters

One of those who expressed official condolences to the relatives of six-year-old Vanya Zavyalov, who died from the fall of a twenty-kilogram block of ice, was the deputy head of the Kirov region Vasily Osipov. Unfortunately, in Osipov’s bureaucratic biography, this tragedy is far from the first, requiring not the belated sympathy on duty, but the timely work of housing and communal services capable of preventing a catastrophe.

No one has ever answered for the collapse of a residential building in Vyborg. But the former Vyborg mayor now works in the Kirovsky district of St. Petersburg



For the administration of the Kirovsky district, Vasily Osipov is a new person (as, indeed, is the entire staff of the district government). But in the Leningrad region they remember him well. More recently, Vasily Viktorovich worked as the mayor of Vyborg, and before that he was in charge of housing and communal services in the same regional city (as the head of the Committee for the Management of Housing and Communal Services, Transport and Communications, as well as the director of the MU “Customer Service”). When in October 2006 in Vyborg the entrance to a dilapidated apartment building No. 11 on Zheleznodorozhnaya Street collapsed and seven people (including an infant) were killed, Osipov was already mayor. The tragedy was preceded by a long period of bureaucratic football, in which the residents of the doomed house were the ball, and Vasily Osipov was, apparently, one of the main football players.
The collapse of a residential building in Vyborg at one time became an event of federal scale (Novaya wrote about it in No. 78, 80 for 2006). On Zheleznodorozhnaya Street, near a building that seemed to have been shot through, not only EMSS officers, but also representatives of law enforcement agencies, journalists, and cameramen from leading Russian TV channels worked for several days. A criminal case was opened, the whole country sympathized with the victims and promised all possible help and support. The culprit of the disaster had to compensate for the damage caused, and with the identification of whom, as it seemed then, the investigation would not have any difficulties.
The fact is that back in 2001, according to the press service of the Russian Railways, the house on Zheleznodorozhnaya Street, 11, was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Oktyabrskaya Railway to the municipal property of the municipal unitary enterprise of Vyborg. Subsequently, the transfer was approved by order of the government of the Russian Federation No. 56-r dated January 16, 2003. However, the government order was strangely not noticed in Vyborg. The building remained ownerless - the city housing and communal services, supervised by Vasily Osipov since 2000, did not recognize it as theirs. At the same time, local officials apparently did not forget to collect fees for the provided utility services.
The lack of control over the condition of the house, of course, worried its residents - especially since the old Finnish-built building was rapidly deteriorating and crumbling before our eyes. In 2004, several apartments at 11 Zheleznodorozhnaya were declared “unsuitable for permanent residence,” as evidenced by a special letter from the State Housing Inspectorate of the Leningrad Region. The same letter informed residents: “By Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation dated September 4, 2003 No. 552, the administration of the Vyborg District of Leningrad Region must make a decision on your resettlement with the provision of other housing.”
One of the local newspapers, “News of Vyborg,” as if anticipating a tragedy, wrote about what was happening in the house: “There was a case when a piece of a leaking ceiling fell a few centimeters from the head of one of the housewives.” The basements of the building were flooded with boiling water due to leaky pipes. “In one of the entrances there is a column of steam, and every day, every hour, every minute it corrodes the entrance and, in particular, the stairs. The latter is so worn that it is supported by only one reinforcement. It's about to collapse. As for individual apartments, mushrooms grow excellently there. Moreover, if you paint the walls and ceilings, the gray spots appear even more strikingly after a while.”
Residents of the “mushroom” house periodically complained to Vyborg utility workers and officials, but they remained deaf to their requests for help. What happened next was what could be expected: the house collapsed, burying the “complainers” under its ruins. Moreover, no one answered for this crime: in 2008, the criminal case initiated under Article 109 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Causing death by negligence”) was suspended by the Directorate of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation for the Leningrad Region - “due to failure to identify the person subject to to be brought as an accused." And more recently, Vasily Osipov went to work for the administration of the Kirovsky district of St. Petersburg, having behind him certainly valuable experience in housing and communal management in Vyborg. His St. Petersburg debut coincided with condolences addressed to those affected by the poor work of the housing and communal services. Let's consider this a simple coincidence.

Valery BERESNEV