Translated material
enemy of the Olympics
Blackout could hurt Sochi's Olympic chances
For almost a day, a significant part of the Black Sea coast of Russia - from Tuapse to Adler - remained without electricity due to bad weather conditions. This blackout on the eve of the visit of the evaluation commission of the International Olympic Committee may negatively affect the prospects of Sochi to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. For Sochi, power outages due to extreme weather conditions are a common situation. The decision on the location of the Olympics will be made this year, and not in three or four years, when they promise to finally protect the city from such cataclysms.The accident occurred on January 30 in the afternoon. According to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, “at 16.57 Moscow time, as a result of the activation of automation on the 220 kilovolt power line, settlements in the area from Tuapse to Adler were left without electricity.”
The power in Sochi was switched off in a chain, as if someone was deliberately pulling switches one after another: first, the energy disappeared in the networks of the Lazarevsky district, then in the Central, Khostinsky and Adler districts. By 17:00 on January 30, the entire Sochi, occupying a 145-kilometer section of the Black Sea coast from the administrative border of the city of Tuapse to the Russian-Georgian border with Abkhazia, was without power. It gets dark quickly in the south, and at 19:00 the city was plunged into pitch darkness.
Boiler houses stopped working, heat and hot water stopped flowing to residential buildings and numerous Sochi health resorts. There were interruptions in the supply of cold water. Sochi residents, and the city now has a population of more than 400 thousand people, rushed to fill all available containers with water and hastily went to shops that had not yet closed for candles and bread. Residents of the resort have experience: over the past 15 years, almost every winter Sochi has spent several days without electricity due to broken power lines. On such days, both water intake and bakeries can stop at any moment.
This time, as journalists were told yesterday at the city headquarters for eliminating the consequences of a natural disaster, wire breaks occurred on two main main power lines - 110 and 220 kilovolts. Both ruptures occurred in the Tuapse region in a remote mountainous area.
All Tuesday a storm raged on the Black Sea coast. Wind gusts reached speeds of 30 meters per second. The sea state exceeded 6 points, and such storms are rare even on the turbulent Black Sea. An alarm was declared in the ports of Sochi and Tuapse due to the possibility of a “thrust” - a special type of wave that tears ships off their moorings and smashes them against the berths. Due to weather conditions, Sochi International Airport was closed. Due to the lack of power in the contact network, railway traffic on the coast stopped. Due to snow drifts, traffic on the only highway connecting Sochi with the rest of the world has stopped. At the resort, the elements toppled trees and billboards and tore roofs off houses. Fortunately, no residents were injured.
Yesterday morning it turned out that all the activities, as the Sochi authorities said, “to brand the city with Olympic symbols,” were carried out in anticipation of the arrival of the IOC evaluation commission (it is supposed to arrive at the resort on February 18 and determine how real Sochi’s claims to the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympics are) ), now we have to start from scratch: there is not a single intact shield left...
Yesterday the storm subsided, the airport resumed operations, trains went to and from Sochi again (for this purpose, railway workers brought 16 diesel locomotives to the coast), the highway was cleared, and restoration work continued all day in places where power line wires were broken. As Viktor Pauli, a member of the board of RAO UES of Russia, who urgently flew to Sochi, told reporters, the situation was aggravated by the fact that one place of the cliff is a deep gorge, and the other is a river valley. Both breaks occurred due to wet snow sticking to the wires and icing them. According to Mr. Pauli, the human factor also unexpectedly worked: when the repairmen got to the place of the cliff in the river valley, it turned out that the piece of copper wire about 1,600 meters long that had fallen to the ground was no longer there - someone had stolen it...
According to the assurances of Sochi Mayor Viktor Kolodyazhny, by Wednesday evening the resort’s activities should be restored in full. But at the time the newspaper went to press, some areas of Sochi, located on the mountain slopes, and many villages included in the municipal formation “City of Sochi” were still without electricity: not only the main power lines were destroyed, but also the intra-city networks. Yesterday no one could say for sure how long it would take to restore them.
Nevertheless, the people of Sochi survived and continue to survive the current cataclysm with significantly fewer problems than in previous years, when they found themselves in a similar situation. Now almost all city enterprises, shops, healthcare institutions, sanatoriums and hotels (and there are about 35 thousand vacationers at the resort these days) have their own autonomous power sources. All night and all yesterday there was a hum over the city from hundreds of working mini-electric generators. The Sochi Thermal Power Plant, which RAO UES of Russia put into operation two years ago, also helped out. This station was created precisely as a backup source of energy supply to ensure the operation of socially significant facilities in Sochi in such critical situations.
The situation in Sochi, of course, once again brought to mind the resort’s Olympic bid . But, as the Sochi-2014 bid committee believes, it will not in any way affect the conclusions of the IOC evaluation commission, since the Federal Target Program for the Development of Sochi as a Mountain Climatic Resort, designed until 2014, provides for the allocation of a large sum for the construction of new capacities of the Sochi Thermal Power Plant , which will have to fully provide the resort with electricity.
This optimism, however, is not shared by Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachev. At yesterday's meeting on eliminating the consequences of the disaster in Sochi, the governor noted that countries that are Russia's competitors in the fight for the right to host the 2014 Olympics are using information about the energy failure in Sochi for their own purposes. "In all the world's media, this topic has not left the screens since the morning. There is a disaster in Sochi, Sochi is without power, people are freezing, how can they hold the Olympics there, and so on. That is, now our competitors, both Korea and Austria, are using this in their purposes,” admitted Mr. Tkachev.