Berezniki, the second largest city in the Perm Territory, was built in 1932 to extract potash and magnesium salts for the production of fertilizers. Now 145 thousand people live here; many of them are in the houses above the mines. Due to the specifics of the local mines in Berezniki, sinkholes are formed in the ground, in which roads, vehicles and buildings disappear. Now there are seven of them; maybe more.
Berezniki, with a population of over 150 thousand people, was once built in the immediate vicinity of the deposits of potash and magnesium salts. Below is a whole network of used mines. For several decades, residential areas were held by so-called pillars - untouched pieces of rock that miners leave to support the soil. But after the accident at the mine, water began to penetrate into the tunnels, which dissolves the salt supports one by one.
The strength and power of Berezniki rests on the underground resources of the Verkhnekamskoye deposit of potassium and magnesium salts. It is the extraction and processing of natural resources that became the foundation of production for such giants of the local industry as OJSC Uralkali and OJSC Avisma. Titanium-Magnesium Combine , JSC Soda. Berezniki are kept on them, like on three whales. The life of more than half of the townspeople is closely connected with these enterprises.
The Berezniki themselves were born precisely due to the existence of the Verkhnekamskoye deposit. The city was actively built and developed in the 30-40s of the last century. One of the participants in this grandiose construction was the foreman Nikolai Yeltsin, the father of the first president of Russia. It was in Berezniki that Boris Yeltsin spent his childhood and adolescence. At the Berezniki school # 1, he received a secondary education certificate at the end of the 40s. And until the mid-90s, Boris Nikolaevich's own sister lived in this city.
The fact that intensive development, especially under the city, is fraught with soil subsidence and collapse, scientists first started talking about back in the mid-70s. But, as they say, until the thunder breaks out, the man does not cross himself. For the first time, the question of filling the worked-out voids near Berezniki was seriously raised only in 1986, when an accident occurred at the third mine of Uralkali, as a result of which it was completely flooded. However, then everything was limited to empty talk.
The total volume of mined-out voids to be laid is 27.4 million cubic meters. According to experts, filling the voids this year alone will require about 245 million rubles, which is equal to a quarter of all revenues of Bereznikov's annual budget. Uralkali itself is in a position to finance the work for only 147 million. Where can I get the remaining 100 and how to solve the issue of financing the backfill works for the future? The administration of the Perm region is racking their brains over this today.
The checkpoint of the first mining administration, headed by Konovalov, is located on one of the central streets of Berezniki - named after Lenin. In some places, potash ore is cut at a depth of only 250-300 meters underground - right under densely populated neighborhoods. The first mining administration of Uralkali is not only the main miner of ore under the city, but also the main producer of stowing operations. Every year, 4 million tons of industrial waste are laid underground in the spent voids. For comparison: 4.5 million tons of potash ore rises from the local mine every year. It can be assumed that local potash workers are working almost idle. After all, the lion's share of the funds mined, processed and sold goes to filling large volumes of voids. If this continues, Uralkali may go bankrupt.
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If in 1997 more than 25 million rubles were spent on laying 2.633 million tons, then this year the laying of the planned 4.2 million tons will cost 181 million rubles. Deputy Mayor of Bereznikov Igor Papkov believes that the state is not fulfilling its obligations to finance stowing works.
On Sunday, July 29, 2007, Dmitry Vdovichenko, who lives on Kotovskogo Street in Berezniki, woke up at six in the morning from the rumble and shaking. He was shaking so much that he and his wife were thrown in bed. The man went out into the street: it smelled of hydrogen sulfide, and there was dust raised by the explosion. Together with neighbors, he rode bicycles to a giant column of smoke, in the direction of the First Potash Mine, which is 700 meters from his house. There Vdovichenko saw fire trucks that drove up to the entrance of the mine. On that day, he did not understand what had happened, he was scared.
At the same time, at six in the morning, Oleg Pashkov, who lived near the entrance, was working on the balcony: “I heard a powerful explosion - something like a nuclear bomb. A minute later, pieces of earth flew out the window. They beat against the glass: 'Melon-melon-melon'”.
The first potash mine in Berezniki - aka the second in Russia - began operating in 1944. Later, three more were opened in Berezniki - all of them belong to the Verkhnekamskoye field. All Bereznikovsky and Solikamsk mines are mined by Uralkali, whose board of directors is chaired by Sergei Chemezov, head of Rostec corporation. The first potash facility provided about 20% of Uralkali's production, which is approximately 1.2 million tons of potash ore per year. Now the company employs 15% of the able-bodied residents of Berezniki; if we take into account family ties, about a quarter of the city's population is associated with it.
In October 2006, water began to seep into the mine of the First Bereznikovsky mine. A week later, it closed, and 500 miners who worked on it were transferred to neighboring mines. Twenty years earlier, in 1986, 11 kilometers from Berezniki, water also got into the potash mine - as a result, a sinkhole of 23 thousand square meters appeared.
Nevertheless, in 2006, Bereznikov Mayor Andrei Motovilov assured Bereznikovites that everything was under control: “Even if the mine is completely flooded, the subsidence of the earth's surface will not be sharp - and this process will last for at least 50 years. And it will be almost imperceptible for the townspeople. On May 4, 2007, the press service of Uralkali said that a short-term failure is unlikely.
In the same summer, groundwater eroded the supports in the mine, and on July 28, above, on the territory of the First Mine near the industrial salt factory, the earth collapsed - a pit 15 meters deep, 50 meters wide and 70 meters long was formed. From the dip to the nearest residential building - 600 meters. It is less than five to the nearest Uralkali building.
The next day, hydrogen sulfide accumulated underground under great pressure burst out, scattering the ground for hundreds of meters around. Many residents of Berezniki heard the roar from the gas release. To monitor the growth of the failure, the city administration launched an airship over the pit. To prevent water from the Kama River from getting into the sinkhole, the city authorities built a dam.
During this time, groundwater continued to flow into the flooded mine and dissolve salt. The sinkhole grew rapidly, a white three-story factory building began to fall into it, and later the neighboring six-story building. The newspapers regularly wrote how many meters it had expanded. “It was like reports from the front,” says local resident Oleg Pashkov.
After some time, the concentration of salt in the liquid increased so much that the water thickened and began to hold back the vaults of the mines. The hole stopped growing, it was filled with groundwater, and it looked like a lake. By that time, the size of the hole in the ground was 146 thousand square meters.
“This failure is harmless for the city. There is no reason to worry, scientists do not predict anything like this within the city limits. We must live a normal, calm life. We will cope with the difficulties,”said the mayor of the city Andrei Motovilov.
On July 29 - the day after the formation of the failure - Vdovichenko went out into the yard and saw that everything was moving there: rats came running from neighboring mines to the nearest houses of the private sector. The man set up a cheese trap and put the dead rats in a sack.
Soon, a crack appeared in his two-story white brick house. First, a finger entered it, then a palm, and then a fist. Now through the hole you can see the neighboring area, but there is not a single whole wall in the house and in some places the floor is falling through. Vdovichenko's children are afraid to let their grandchildren visit him.
On November 24, 2010, the Berezniki dispatcher Alexander Nazaretsky had a regular night shift at the railway station. Suddenly, a freight train stopped abruptly. “The station attendant told me on the radio:“What's the matter, why isn't the train leaving?”The train driver is silent. I - to the window, I look, and there is a distance between the cars. I told the duty officer that self-uncoupling of the carriages had occurred and that there was no soil under such and such a carriage,”the man recalled.
The city railway station is also located above the First mine, and the freight train, the stop of which attracted Nazaretsky's attention, ended up on the rails exactly at the moment of the appearance of a new failure. One of the cars fell into the pit - and remains there to this day. The railroad tracks were shortened, and the station was closed for six days, after which it was reopened. Russian Railways claimed that there would be no new sinkholes on the station's territory, and the danger zone was limited to a radius of 150 meters around the hole. All this time, freight trains continued to run next to the gap, which quickly grew and filled with water. It went beyond the railroad tracks and swallowed up several garages and a piece of road. They tried to fill the hole with earth - but that also subsided, and now the hole looks like a lake fenced off. The last time it was measured in February - it came out 135 by 144 meters.
Russian Railways tried three times to restore full-fledged freight and passenger traffic and built three bypass railways for this - but the failures grew simultaneously with construction. Now the first two roads are recognized as dangerous, and the third goes to the 53-kilometer bypass of Berezniki; the state and the state company spent almost 12 billion rubles on all this.
A year after the incident at the train station - December 4, 2011 - a new hole formed next to the gas station and not far from the previous failure. At first it was small - 10 by 15 meters, but after two months it increased 35 times. The next summer, when the area of the hole was already almost 10 thousand square meters, they began to fill it up. At some point, the edge on which the equipment was working collapsed - two bulldozers and a loader, in which the driver Gennady Parfyonov was, fell into a hole 60 meters deep. Now there is a cross with his portrait near the building of the former station. His body was never found.
Panic began in Berezniki. Sergei, a resident of Berezniki, recalls how many of his acquaintances believed that “half the city would fall into the ground” and people regularly fall into the pits. The city was full of rumors and people didn't know what to believe. On the city's main Internet forum, berforum.ru, users actively discussed the situation in the city and migration. "Everything that is acquired by the labor of parents and mine weighs on the edge of this fucking failure, the best is that everything has already failed, so even if the state would pay, and not pay in the noose, you will not climb, there will be nothing to lose, we will sit down on the path and go away from here", - wrote the user for (spelling and punctuation of the original preserved - approx. Meduza).
In 2014, the Berezniki railway station was finally closed. Now only buses go to the city. There are freight trains on the old railway tracks. Nearby is a large lake: it was formed when the third hole grew so much that it united with the second.
“The places where the accelerated subsidence of the earth is taking place is the workings of the 50s,” explains Igor Sanfirov, director of the Mining Institute of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (this institute is responsible for monitoring and control of failures together with the Ural Research Institute of Halurgy, controlled by Uralkali). “At that time, science was not at the level to calculate how much rock could be obtained so that the earth would not collapse.” According to Sanfirov, if a crack appears in the salt mine, through which water seeps, then it is impossible to prevent the failure, since "there are no technologies that would allow soluble rock to stop the water." “In 2006, specialists from all over the world came here, and no one suggested anything,” the scientist says.
Sanfirov and other scientists talk about another possible reason for the formation of sinkholes - when there is no clay layer in the soil that protects the mines from groundwater (this is exactly what happened to the First Mine, according to the head of the Perm Rostekhnadzor Stanislav Yuzhanin). One way or another, if the water is already in the mine, there is only one way to improve the situation - to "fill" (that is, fill with waste material) empty spaces so that the earth has nowhere to sink: this will not prevent the formation of sinkholes, but it can help to reduce the size of holes and the number cracks in houses. The "laying" of mines in Berezniki began only in 1992 - more than thirty years after the end of mining in those areas of the mines where failures later occurred. However, access to the mines was hampered by the collapses of old mines, and 90% of the work ended up being carried out only on paper. This was told to Meduza by a former employee of a mine rescue team working in Berezniki and neighboring Solikamsk, where gaps are also forming (the interlocutor asked Meduza not to give his name); similar data are given in the investigation of Novaya Gazeta about the business of Dmitry Rybolovlev, who was the actual owner of Uralkali.
Ten years later, in 2002, local authorities and Uralkali adopted a joint six-year program to fill all the voids under the city. Its estimated cost was to be about one and a half billion rubles. An employee of the Mining Institute, on condition of anonymity, told Meduza that by 2004-2005, only half of the first mine (on the territory of which the last six failures occurred) had already been laid; at the same time, the website of Uralkali says that in 2004 the company exceeded its plan for laying mines. Whether the program was fully implemented is unknown. The press service of Uralkali did not answer Meduza's questions. In 2016, Vladimir Putin instructed the Prosecutor General's Office to verify the company's compliance with the legislation “regulating the planning and implementation of stowing operations in mines”; there they answered,that the laying works are being carried out “in accordance with technical projects and plans”.
To the right is a failure, to the left is a failure
On February 17, 2015, the next failure happened - a few meters from the school number 26, which was closed back in 2007. In 2017, two more pits appeared near a private house on Kotovskogo Street, which also went underground: now only its roof is visible. In the southern part of the city, where the last six failures are located, an Orthodox church, two schools, two kindergartens, a military enlistment office and a house of culture have been closed in recent years, which was demolished. The courthouse was also demolished, but for some reason the garbage left after the demolition has not yet been removed.
Despite all this, people still live near the gaps. The house of Sergei Sokolov, a pensioner and former Uralkali employee, is literally a few dozen meters from the last sinkhole - Sokolov regularly watches through binoculars as the neighbor's house sinks into the ground. In Sokolov's garage, the concrete floor burst - and a hole appeared, into which he periodically pokes a crowbar, and his house is covered with cracks. However, as the man says, this situation has its advantages: lately he does not have to pump out waste from the cesspool - "everything goes somewhere down."
Sokolov is often seen with the guards of the failure, who are on guard in the booth near the fence. One day his grandchildren were walking around the house. The guard made a remark to them:
- Why are you walking here, wanted to fail?
“We live here,” the children answered.
- Oh, then go for a walk.
For several years Sokolov has not been in the garden and has not taken care of the house. He believes that this is pointless: soon "everything will fail here." “It was dragged into a hole behind an expensive house,” says the man. "We have a failure behind us, a failure on the right, and we still live." The state commission, which periodically inspects his house, has a different opinion: it calls the housing "partially suitable for habitation" and believes that he needs major repairs - for which, however, no one is in a hurry to allocate money.
A similar situation is with Mikhail Maltsev, who worked as a mining harvester driver for forty-two years at one of the Berezniki mines and retired in 2013. His house is a few hundred meters from the first hole, and the street where Maltsev lives rests against the fences surrounding the pits; the garages opposite his house were also recently surrounded by a tin fence.
When Maltsev was in the shower this summer, the electricity went out in the house, and the man saw a bright light that made its way through a crack in the wall. Later he looked around the house and realized that a crack was splitting the building in half. “At first there was a panic, I even took away some of the furniture, but where can you go - I still live. It happens that I sit in the kitchen in the evening and hear a tree hitting a tree in the corridor: "Knock-knock," says the former miner. - At first I thought that this refrigerator works, - turned it off to check. Not him. It's just that the house is sinking."
For the winter, Maltsev fills the cracks with construction foam, but it still blows hard from them. The house tilts to the side, so the doors do not close in many openings. Due to ground movements in the area, the water supply often "breaks". Previously, he failed twice a week. After complaints from residents, the city administration nevertheless replaced the pipes with flexible plastic ones.
Maltsev's house, according to the commissions, is also not in danger: it stands on the pillar, so the land under it is not recognized as a dangerous zone, despite numerous cracks in the walls.
The city authorities nevertheless decided to resettle many houses - for example, after the formation of the first failure in 2007, the corresponding program affected 29 houses. “We were specifically frightened then, they said that the house would fail, and everyone was quickly evicted within a year,” recalls a resident of one of them, Oleg Pashkov, who then worked at Uralkali as a roof cutter. - But I was not afraid of anything, I thought that failure would not reach here. I did not agree to move to the housing offered by the city, but decided to take it with money. And those who were afraid didn’t wait for money and moved to polystyrene sandwich panels”.
The former Pashkov house at the beginning of Gorky Street still stands today. It is abandoned, like dozens of houses around. City buses do not reach the end of Lenin Avenue - they turn around and go back: further - the dangerous zone. Opposite the last stop there is a fenced-in wasteland. In its place there used to be a house of culture, from which a staircase and an overgrown first floor without walls remained, where local residents drink in the evenings. The townspeople advise to bypass this place (when Meduza's correspondents were here, a man with a bloody face stood silently at the bus stop) - but they themselves often walk around the wasteland anyway: it's closer.
Pashkov bought a new apartment on credit, and Uralkali pledged to pay interest on it. In 2016, small cracks began to appear in the house where he now lives; soon the house was recognized as emergency - and soon the man would have to move again. Pashkov himself, however, says that the cracks are not so big - you can cover them up.
In 2013, 99 houses were declared damaged - this is one tenth of all houses in the city; it was necessary to relocate about 12 thousand people. Now, according to local residents, there are twice as many such houses - 189. Because of the failures, Berezniki was divided into five zones: dangerous, conditionally dangerous, suitable for building with restrictions, suitable for multi-storey buildings up to five floors inclusive and suitable for building without restrictions.
“When the first failure happened, it was a disaster, then I got used to it. The wife is now, of course, in a panic, she is under stress: they just settled in, made repairs - and moved again, - says Pashkov. "It is not yet known which house they will be accommodated in, but now I want to live in a brick house, because the panel ones fold up like dominoes." Many residents, like Oleg, are already accustomed to living near gaps. “They will evict me now, but I don’t want to. I have lived here all my life and am not afraid of anything,”says a man who refused to introduce himself. - And where to go? The whole city lives near gaps. If there is a new failure near my house, then, of course, it will be scary. And so - no: from my house to the failure as much as 400 meters."
People also do not want to move because they are being relocated to a new area on the right bank of the Kama - Usolye. It takes half an hour by bus to get there, and there is almost no infrastructure around the colorful high-rise buildings. In addition, there are too many residents who need to be relocated, so many are given housing in houses that are not yet ready - and they have to wait for a new apartment in the same emergency houses.
Earlier, according to Berezniki residents, instead of new real estate, it was possible to receive monetary compensation, but now this is not provided. Artyom Fayzulin, a lawyer with the public organization Civil Supervision, says the authorities are violating the Housing Code, but the city administration and the Perm Regional Court think otherwise.
A separate business has already appeared around the mass resettlement. In many emergency houses there are announcements: “I will buy an apartment in your house in any condition”; some announcements are placed by the "Trust" real estate agency, which acts as an intermediary between the owners of dilapidated housing and people who want to move to Usolye. According to the operator "Trust", it is beneficial to everyone: “A two-room apartment in an emergency building costs up to a million rubles. And the same in area, but a new apartment on the right bank of the river - 1.3-1.4 million. It's easier for people to buy emergency housing and wait until they are given an apartment in a new building."
Wastelands appear on the site of the demolished emergency buildings, which are quickly overgrown with grass. Houses that are empty become the territory of teenagers. Most often they gather in a former bathhouse, a three-story brick building with trees growing on the roof: during the day they play paintball here, and at night, it happens that people who are called Satanists gather. Children say they love to spend time in a "dark room" - a room with no light in the basement - and in a dilapidated attic. Sometimes teenagers break down the walls of a building - "with their feet". One of them bears a large inscription: “BETTER PAIN IN MUSCLES THAN DRUGS AND ALCOHOL”.
There are also emergency houses in Berezniki, where people still live. Marina Gorcheva lives in one of them. Her work is also connected with failures - she has been working as a security guard all her life (she says that “she can’t do anything else”), and now she is guarding one of the pits, making sure that there is no looting in the nearest emergency houses. Gorcheva sits in a booth near a tin fence, makes rounds and learns tickets for the annual recertification at the private security company. She works day after day so that there is enough for an apartment that she rents in an emergency house for five thousand rubles. The ceiling is propped up by wooden piles, and there has been no hot water for several months - it gushes from a broken pipe on the second floor. Gorcheva lives on the third. In winter, she enters the staircase "like a cave": there are icicles hanging and there is snow. Half of the residents of the house moved out,and in empty apartments fires often occur - teenagers and drug addicts like to be there.
Residents who still live in the house love to spend time on the street: at three o'clock in the afternoon on the curb near the entrance a large company is drinking noisily. Preschool children are running nearby. There is no light in any entrance, many windows are boarded up and shattered. On one of the first floors, all apartments are without doors; it is dark inside, it smells of dampness and rot, there is rubbish and in some places - mattresses.
Some city houses are only partially recognized as emergency - for example, at 29 Sverdlov Street, two out of six entrances are not serviced. Over the past month, there have been four fires here - while people continue to live in emergency apartments. Squatting in the stairwell in a pink dressing gown, Lyudmila, who has spent the last 15 years in this house, lights a cigarette and tells how she regularly finds syringes in abandoned corridors and apartments on the ground floor. She has to clean up the garbage after the fires, but she does not pay for hot water, since it simply does not reach her apartment - it flows from a pipe on the first floor. The woman complained to the city administration, but they told her that they could not help her, and jokingly offered to live in a tent on the street. Uralkali's central office is located across the street from Lyudmila's house.
High-rise apartment buildings for immigrants did not appear in Usolye immediately. Next to them there are 89 two-story houses, painted in white, blue and yellow - the very "sandwich panels" that Pashkov talks about. The Berezniki administration built them after a failure in 2007. Four years later, when 179 people were already living in them, Rospotrebnadzor established that formaldehyde was emitted from the walls. The colorless gas, which is often found in building materials and furniture, is hazardous to health: it causes irritation, itching, lethargy, frequent headaches, trouble sleeping, and increases the likelihood of cancer. Almost 1.4 billion rubles were allocated from the federal budget for the construction of formaldehyde houses.
The permissible level of formaldehyde in homes is exceeded 50 times. In 2012, criminal cases were opened against several local officials - they were accused of abuse of office and "performing work and providing services that do not meet the safety or health requirements of consumers in relation to works and services intended for children under six years of age." … Four years later, the charges were reclassified into “lighter” ones and the cases were dropped after the statute of limitations expired.
The press service of the Perm Territory sent a number of clarifications to the material to Meduza's editors. Thus, the letter states that there is infrastructure (a children's hospital, a kindergarten, shops and transport; several more facilities are under construction) on the territory of a residential complex with multi-colored high-rise buildings. In addition, according to the Berezniki administration, there are no offices in houses with high concentrations of formaldehyde (though Meduza's correspondents have seen them).
According to lawyer Faizulin, the Berezniki administration persuaded more than 70 families to voluntarily move from formaldehyde houses to new housing. But one family - I could not. Vladimir Ponomarev and his wife and daughter have been living in such a house for nine years, seven of which he is suing officials: he demands that his apartment be officially declared unfit for habitation and that monetary compensation be paid. According to the man, formaldehyde has not yet affected his health - but it has affected his nerves. “I feel psychological discomfort from the fact that I live in a house that is unhealthy and because of it I may have problems,” explains Ponomarev. “It’s like I’m walking through a minefield: it’s not bombed yet, and I’m alive, but I’m already trembling.”
In 2014, Ponomarev won a court case and secured the recognition of his apartment as unfit for life. According to him, he has already spent hundreds of thousands of rubles on the courts. Now the man wants to get money for a formaldehyde apartment and is soon going to sue the city administration again. Now he is afraid to communicate with a journalist without a lawyer: “Now I’ll tell you something wrong, and then again, somewhere, it’s not in my favor. With my words, I can scare away what I have built in seven years of work. A lot of media came to me, including Channel One, but it doesn't help me in any way, because our mayor's office is not afraid of anyone or anything. These publications will make her even more furious. It is noteworthy that the current mayor of Bereznikov, Sergei Dyakov, is a native of Uralkali; he began his career in 1978 at the First Mine.
The Berezniki administration (its representatives refused to communicate with Meduza correspondents, advising them to read about the situation in the city on the Internet) still allocates money for the maintenance of formaldehyde houses. In 2016, 35 million rubles were spent on security, snow removal and other needs. In January 2017, they decided to demolish the houses, but so far they still have offices - the local police, the management company and the post office work in the houses. Workers who build new buildings for future migrants live here.
Sanfirov, the director of the Mining Institute, claims that there is no need to expect new failures in Berezniki. "Observations are made - some monthly, some weekly, some twice a year," says the scientist. “And according to their results, today there are no places in the city that will fail tomorrow.” However, the Mining Institute is working for Uralkali under the contract - and neither the company nor local officials until now have never informed the population about new failures, only informing after the fact that they were predicted.
An employee of the Mining Institute working in the department of active seismic acoustics, on condition of anonymity, told Meduza that, in fact, a new failure had long been predicted - and it will occur in the village of Zyryanka located on the territory of Berezniki. “The evacuation of people has already begun there, and soon the entire territory will be fenced off,” adds Meduza's source. “This has long been known, and, of course, our bosses and Uralkali’s management know it.”
The residents of Zyryanka themselves, however, do not know about the failures. Some of the houses here are also recognized as hazardous - however, a woman living in one of them told Meduza that the building received this status due to dilapidation. “I haven’t heard about sinkholes,” she adds, “but geologists are constantly walking around the village and measuring something with some kind of garbage. We were even here today."
In August 2017, the Berezniki administration decided to shift "the negative background that arose around the failures to a more positive plane." For this, they are going to erect a monument to the failure in the city park. 2.7 million rubles will be spent on the installation of a bronze arch, near which Ostap Bender and Kisa Vorobyaninov will stand. According to Roman Korotaev, a local resident, most of the townspeople consider it "blasphemy." “It's a painful topic for people,” the man says. "They are not funny."