The so-called Kurenevsky flood, which occurred in Kiev in 1961, is considered the second largest man-made disaster in the USSR, after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Despite this, few people knew about her outside of Kiev, since all information about the misfortune was strictly classified.
The Kiev flood was not reported on the radio or in the newspapers - the authorities did their best to hide the very fact of the terrible catastrophe, the blame for which lay entirely with the state. Today it is customary to blame Alexei Davydov, chairman of the Kiev City Executive Committee, for the Kurenev flood. It was on his initiative that a dump of construction waste, grand in its scope, appeared within the city.
But no one knows why a dangerous object appeared in the immediate vicinity of residential areas. Even fewer people accusing Davydov of criminal negligence know about the merits of this manager, thanks to whom the capital of the Ukrainian SSR received the Paton Bridge, a new circus, the first metro line and Borispol airport. He headed the city of Davydov in 1947, when Kiev lay in ruins and Joseph Stalin personally closely followed its success in the first years.
The colossal construction site, which Kiev turned into in the 50s, needed an equally large-scale dump of construction waste. Particularly acute was the problem of storage of pulp - liquid waste of brick production. Here Davydov made a mistake, allowing to organize a landfill in the area of Babi Yar, very close to the densely populated Kurenevka, located in the lowland.
The pulp storage was restrained by a bulk dam, the design of which was made with serious mistakes. First of all, the designers incorrectly calculated the pulp pressure on the hydraulic structure. This substance, semi-liquid and viscous, pressed against the dam with much more force than ordinary water. It was also not taken into account that during the melting of snow and spring rains, the content of the slurry storage increases significantly in volume due to the massive inflow of water.
Kiev stands on loess soils, which absorb moisture very poorly, so the water did not saturate the soil with itself, but was collected at the landfill, increasing the already enormous pressure on the dam. Also played a role and the fact that the local authorities urged on by the Moscow leadership tried to fulfill the task as quickly as possible, which led to many violations and deviations from the already "raw" project.
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Long before the catastrophe, the dam of the pulp storage, where the waste was poured for almost 10 years, began to leak. Residents of Babi Yar complained about dirty streams running through the streets and courtyards all year round, but the City Executive Committee incorrectly assessed the scale of the problem and decided that the reconstruction of the structure could wait.
On March 12, 1961, the City Executive Committee began to receive alarming calls that the dam is literally bursting, and water is pouring through it in whole streams. On the night of March 12-13, the situation worsened before our eyes, and on the morning of March 13, a terrible catastrophe occurred.
Kurenevka is a working-class district of Kiev and at 6 am life was already in full swing here. Someone just woke up, and someone was already standing at the bus stop, waiting for their bus. On the Frunze Street, closest to the unfortunate dam, for the last few days, water has been pouring in streams, and few people paid attention to the fact that the water in them rose. Meanwhile, a kilometer higher, near the "Spartak" stadium, the flooding has already begun and the first houses of the private sector "floated".
Local residents began to call the City Executive Committee and tell that the dam was just falling apart before our eyes, but it was too late to do anything. At 8.30 in the morning, the dam completely burst and pulp poured into the gap formed, forming a swell 20 meters wide and 14 meters high.
Semi-liquid pulp, mixed with solid construction waste, debris from houses and trees, rushed to the tram depot, where the working day began long ago. All high-voltage switches were turned on here, and no one even suspected of the rapidly approaching death.
The pulp instantly filled the territory of the enterprise, destroyed part of the buildings and filled the survivors to the ceiling. People who escaped death by drowning in the mud and among the rubble of buildings died from electric shock. The stream carried on and burst out into the streets where public transport went. This is how the surviving eyewitnesses miraculously told about the flood:
The Spartak stadium was filled to the brim with water. In places the liquid mud rose so high that it hid a wrought-iron fence. The disaster completely covered the Kurenevsky district and there was nowhere to escape from it. The heavy slurry effortlessly demolished brick buildings and overturned concrete ones. People died not only from drowning - a rather dense substance squeezed them, causing asphyxiation, and its dynamic pressure broke bones.
Those streets, where the tsunami had not yet reached, began to evacuate, but everything was extremely poorly organized, which further increased the number of victims. Troops were urgently brought to the area, arriving on tracked and wheeled vehicles, which quickly found themselves in captivity of a viscous pulp.
The properties of the substance that flooded Kurenevka significantly exacerbated the situation. The pulp dried quickly, turning into a dense monolith. People who found themselves under the rubble of houses were captured by a thickening slurry, which, solidifying, crushed them and blocked the access of air. The captured people had practically no chances to survive.
According to official data, which were announced by the Kiev authorities, only 150 people died during the man-made disaster. But it was clear to all eyewitnesses that the death toll was significantly underestimated. Historian Alexander Anisimov, who has been researching the man-made disaster for many years, claims that the pulp tsunami claimed the lives of at least 1,500 people in Kiev.
According to the service report, during the disaster, 68 residential and 13 office buildings were completely destroyed, as well as 163 private houses, in which, according to the most conservative estimates, 1,228 people lived. There is no data on the dead and wounded in the official document, since it was decided to take maximum measures to hide the scale of the tragedy.
On March 13, long-distance and international communications were cut off in Kiev, and the official statement about the disaster was made only three days later - on March 16, 1961. The dead were transported to morgues in different districts of Kiev, and then buried in different cemeteries, without bothering to make identification and notify relatives and friends.
Different dates were indicated on the monuments, and records in the cemetery books were not made or were deliberately distorted. In the conclusion about death, they wrote anything except the true cause of death, therefore, it may never be possible to establish the exact number of deaths.
The pulp, which filled the streets of the Kiev region, began to be cleaned with the involvement of construction and military equipment immediately after the pulp stopped arriving. This was done by soldiers who had no experience in eliminating the consequences of such disasters, which further exacerbated the situation. The few who survived under the rubble perished under excavator buckets and shifted cranes by building structures.
When it was all over, a commission from Moscow began to investigate the man-made disaster. All actions were carried out in an atmosphere of the strictest secrecy. It is known that the six creators of the dam project were found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. The investigation established that errors in the calculation of the structure's hydraulic dumps were to blame.