Tragedies with human victims time and again expose the illusory nature of government control over compliance with certain rules – this time, gold mining. Another bad tradition in this area is the ability of local rent controllers to escape responsibility in emergency situations.

Early in the morning of October 19, five dams standing one after another along the Seiba River on the territory of a gold mine near the village of Shchetinkino (about 300 km from Krasnoyarsk) were destroyed, the Investigative Committee (SKR) reported. The break of the last dam led to the flooding of two dormitories of the shift camp, where about 80 workers of the gold mining cooperative "Sisim" lived. According to preliminary data, 15 people died, 44 were injured, the fate of five more people is unknown.

The reasons for the dam break are being established, the Investigative Committee's top-priority version is violations during gold mining operations. Krasnoyarsk Krai Governor Alexander Uss reported that the dam belongs to the Sibzoloto holding company, which operates on the river under a license, i.e. the team mined gold there legally. But in other respects, local authorities are washing their hands of it. According to Uss, the dam was not officially registered. Supervisory authorities had no idea that such work had been carried out in this location, echoes regional government chairman Yuri Lapshin. It turns out that the team members built the dam without permission. The work was done in a makeshift manner, "in violation of all conceivable and inconceivable norms," Lapshin said.

This is not the first time that the authorities have spoken about the shortcomings of control in such situations – this is quite typical logic in the case of mass deaths. A recent example is the fire in the Kemerovo shopping center "Winter Cherry", which killed 60 people. But it is difficult to imagine that five dams (one of them was 15 m high) were built without the knowledge of the authorities, without control and supervision, especially since we are talking about such a special industry as gold mining: it requires a lot of permits and FSB control (local environmentalists have repeatedly complained about the pollution of water in the Seyba downstream – this alone should have been a reason for inspections). Another thing is that gold mining is a very regulated industry, in fact, any enterprise bypasses some legal norms, suggests Tatyana Zhuravskaya from the Khamovniki Research Foundation, co-author of the report on gold mining in the Far East. Those who cannot comply with all the rules usually negotiate with local controllers, and the controllers are concerned with compliance with reporting requirements, not with real prevention of emergencies. And this is a problem not only for the extractive industries.

Control washed away by water