"People live here, but poison like cockroaches"

“In the last days of January in Bratsk there was a terrible stink and was a white one. Nausea, dizziness, obvious signs of poisoning. It can be seen with the naked eye that this one could - emissions from enterprises. Of course, local organs will write on paper that there are no excesses and air purification filters work. But in reality this is not so. People still live here, and they poison like cockroaches, ”-such appeals are sent by the brother to the president’s receptionist in the fifth year of their city in the federal project“ Clean Air ”.

Thanks to the “clean air”, Bratsk since 2019 received more than 26.5 billion rubles. According to official figures, according to official figures , the treatment facilities at local enterprises were modernized: aluminum and pulp and paper plants, at the factory of ferroalloys, thermal power plants were repaired, and hundreds of rosures in the city are gasified and no longer need heated by coal. Together, according to the program, this was supposed to reduce emissions by 20%by 2024, and 4 times from individual sources.

But the inhabitants of Bratsk claim that everything is not entirely true: according to them, local officials and employees of the regulatory authorities are simply more cunning than before, supposedly conducting measurements of the content of harmful substances in the air before the enterprises produce the main emissions. And they confirm their position with answers from Rospotrebnadzor, indicating a strange confusion: according to answers, local plants have no violations, but the maximum permissible concentrations (MPC) of harmful substances in the air are regularly exceeded.

The “resin” understood how and with whom the brotherly fights for the right to clean air.

Clarified enterprises

“Our largest plants are the“ Bratsk Aluminum Plant ”(Brus) and“ Bratsk Forestry Complex ”(BLPK), which is actually within the city,” explains activist Elena Kutergina. -And these two enormous production have been giving on the heads of citizens since the 60s. Of course, there were some modernization, but there is no qualitative change.

“I managed to work as an engineer at the sites of both enterprises and saw all violations with my own eyes,” confirms the brother Anatoly Shamansky. - Of the 26 gas cleaners, designed by me at Braz in 2007, 11 were built.

Brus and BLPK love to call city -forming enterprises, assuring that without them the city will die, so they need to forgive everything. However, only about 6,000 employees work in a city with a population of 220,000 people, no more than 5%. So it is more of city-destructive enterprises-from Bratsk a huge outflow of the population due to the environmental situation.

Braz, on which Anatoly Shamansky designed gas cleaning, produces about 30% of all aluminum in Russia. This is one of the largest metallurgical plants in the country - only in 2022 it produced more than one hundred million tons of commodity aluminum. Brother belongs to one of the world leaders of the industry - a group of companies Rusal, the main beneficiary of which is billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

The Bratsk Forestry Complex, the second largest pollutant in the city, produces 35% of Russian cellulose. According to the results of 2021, the revenue of the enterprise amounted to 180.3 billion rubles, and the value of assets was estimated at 106 billion. Since 1997, the BLPK has been part of the Ilim group, the leader of the pulp and paper industry of Russia. The founders "Ilima" are billionaires Brothers Boris and Mikhail Zingsi and their companion Zakhar Smushkin.

- The Ilim group in 2013 conducted large -scale modernization and promised to remove bad gases. But in fact, it only increased the power of BLPK, according to our estimates, from 720 thousand tons to 1.3 million tons, ”Elena Kutergina complains. - And the emissions have not disappeared. <...> But people do not want to live like hunted cockroaches. We have very large groups on social networks, in the amount of about 100 thousand subscribers. We place our statement templates there, and people are simply hammering [officials]. 50 people called the last hot line of the environmental prosecutor's office in a day.

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Not very clean air

The federal project “Clean Air” was to solve the environmental problems of Bratsk. It is aimed at improving the environmental situation and reducing emissions of pollutants. Among the stated tasks-reducing emissions in the participating cities by at least 20%, by 2024, and by 2030-twice.

Bratsk got into the "clean air" from the very launch of the program in 2019. This means that officials recognized him as one of the 12 most polluted cities in the country. And already in the winter of 2020, a strong wave of emissions occurred in the city, which the mayor of the city Sergei Serebrennikov dubbed “fogs”. After her, as Elena Kutergina explains, residents and thought about the influence of factories on their well -being.

Today, in Bratsk, Rospotrebnadzor regularly records exceeding benzapiren, formaldehyde, hydroxybenzole and a number of other substances. Benzapirene is a carcinogen that is dangerous for a person even in a small concentration. And formaldehyde and hydroxybenzole affect the bronchopulmonary system and even with a slight concentration in the air cause irritation of the skin and mucous membranes. However, the publisher of Rospotrebnadzor does not have any complaints to Ilom and Rusal.

Moreover, the incidence of chronic bronchitis in the city is twice as high as in the region. Brotherhood problems are recorded 1.3 times more often than in the region, with the nervous system-2.6 times, with the bone muscular system-4.5 times. Doctors directly call the cause of contaminated air.

In a conversation with Smol, the locals confirm that they have more health problems than residents of the region - even except for headaches arising during the “fogs”.

- This is a psychologically very difficult existence, you seem to be in a public toilet. He cuts the eyes, pierces in the throat, allergic diseases, including asthma, are very common. I myself had lived in Irkutsk for a long time, everything was fine with health. But after ten years in Bratsk, everything that was connected with the respiratory system was aggravated. Sinusitis, sinusitis. And so many, ”explains Elena Kutergina. - And Bratsk is one of the leaders in cancer diseases. We have medical monitoring several years ago, the risk of disease was eight times higher than in cities without aluminum production. In addition, the proximity with the aluminum plant [Brus] is a large load on the musculoskeletal system. The bones from constant inhalation of fluoride compounds are literally destroyed.

- I am now working in a rotational basis in Transbaikalia, but my daughters live in Bratsk. And both have been destroyed by their teeth that doctors associate with fluorine emissions, ”says Anatoly Shamansky. - We cannot get any compensations from the plant. I repeatedly appealed to the prosecutor’s office using the data of the Irkutsk Directorate for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring. He demanded to identify the perpetrators and bring to justice. But he received unsubscribes.

In January 2024, the city administration stated that the summary of the Clean Air project in Bratsk was transferred to 2026. The deadlines, according to the city hall, were changed due to the Pandemia of Coronavirus, which ended several years ago. At the same time, the head of the Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia, Alexander Kozlov, admitted that the reason is “new economic realities”.