On the morning of March 13, 1961, the largest man-made disaster took place in Kiev, called the Kurenev Apocalypse.
It began with the fact that melt water overflowed the historical Babi Yar and, mixing with sandy-clay waste, merged by two Petrovsky brick factories, destroyed an earthen dam. This is how a multi-meter mud rampart arose, rushing into the lowland near the St. Cyril Church.
Prelude to tragedy
According to Kiev historians, the “city fathers” took the first step towards disaster on March 28, 1950. It was then that at a meeting of the executive committee of the Kiev City Council, a decision was made No. 582. It approved the project of hydraulic dumps in the spurs of Babi Yar for dumping waste from brick factories. Subsequently, it was planned to create two residential areas and a road on the hardened pulp. The technical justification was prepared by the Moscow trust "Hydromechanization" of the Union Ministry of Industrial Building Materials. Initially, it was planned to fill the ravines only by three-quarters with construction slurry waste. At the same time, solid agricultural structures were to be erected from clay and cemented broken bricks.
However, everything was canceled out by the decision № 2405 of the executive committee of the Kiev City Council. To speed up and save money, the fortified dam was replaced with a simple earthen dam, and the vast drains were replaced by a pair of narrow pipes. In addition, the filling level, without taking into account the flood waters, was raised to the very edge of the ravine!
Engineers at the Kiev Institute of Geodesy and Cartography sounded the alarm: they provided the authorities with extremely negative assessments of new design changes, leading directly to a large-scale disaster. Narrow pipes for draining liquid soil, which do not provide optimal drainage for excess water when the reservoir overflows, were also criticized. In addition, the brick factories switched to the "Stakhanov" three-shift rhythm of work, sharply increasing the volume of dumped pulp …
The special inspection of the Podolsk district also sounded the alarm, reporting that the Babi Yar ditch was always in disrepair, especially in the spring. At the same time, water with sand overflows the banks and floods the adjacent territories of enterprises and organizations. As a result, in three pools on the terraces of Babi Yar, the critical mass of water mixed with sand and clay soon began to exceed all permissible norms.
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The last alarming report from the head of the special inspection of the Podolsk region was received in February 1961 …
Was drunk
On the night before the disaster, the dump worker on duty, Voinovich, was very anxious, and in order to dispel the dreary mood, he decided to go fishing. From late evening, the surrounding dogs howled terribly, the icy wind drove the charges of wet snow, catching up with a swell on the surface of the lake. The water stood here for several years, and the pool managed to "stock up". But the fishing happiness slipped away: it seemed that all the fish life had disappeared from the leaden surface of the pool. Having got pretty wet, Voinovich trotted off to dry himself in the boardwalk to the potbelly stove. Approaching the duty room, he noticed that the water level was rapidly rising, and the sky was illuminated with some strange flashes, as if from a distant thunderstorm, the dog's barking intensified …
Just before dawn, Voinovich, who was dozing in the warmth, was awakened by some kind of uterine rumble. Jumping out, he noticed with alarm that the waves were splashing at the very edge of the dam, and rushed to call the authorities. The awakened brigadier for a long time could not understand anything from Voinovich's words "about the flood of waves, the hum and thuds like a drum", but, making sure that he was sober, he promised to send a bulldozer in the morning.
From eight in the morning, the water had already begun to overlap the dam. Voinovich began to call all authorities: the firemen, the police, and even the person on duty for the district executive committee. No one took his anxiety seriously. Suddenly, a thunderous blow followed, "like a cannon shot." Throwing himself onto the dam, Voinovich saw that the mudflow had not overflowed the dams, but at the very base a mud volcano was rapidly gaining strength. The body of the dam was spreading out next to him, and soon a real mudflow of hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of wet pounds rolled down the ravine to Frunze Street.
The verdict of the state commission, which considered the Kurenev catastrophe, was clear: the witness Voinovich was drunk or in shock, so he saw all sorts of tremors and flashes of fire …
Sabotage?
There were other testimonies from the surviving residents of Kurenevka, who felt some unusual "vibrations of the soil, as if something had exploded at the bottom of the ravine."
Sabotage? Major of State Security Suprun was instructed to clarify the issue with specialists, He turned to the famous hydrogeologist Ivan Alexandrovich Mesyats, who knew Kiev's bowels well. From him, he learned that Babi Yar, by its natural structure, is prone to heterogeneous landslides, so the dam had to be made of different thickness, strengthening the foundation of the dam in dangerous directions where the pulp pressure is strongest. The month suggested that the filling of Babiy Yar with heavy runoff could disrupt the soil balance. Most likely, the thousand-ton mass of the slurry led to the displacement of the underground layers, causing the release of gas and water from the deep-lying caverns, followed by a hydraulic shock. That is why the mud fountain came from the very base of the dam.
Suprun noted in his report that many of the commission's conclusions in the light of the investigation carried out by him look unfounded and are dictated by narrow departmental interests. So, perhaps, experts and investigators are faced with facts for which there was no reasonable explanation?
A dragon crawling along the rift
Japanese-American seismologist Hiro Kanamori is known for his contributions to the geophysics of tectonic processes and the creation of a new earthquake scale. Together with his Caltech colleague Tom Hanks and compatriot Masayuki Kikuchi of Nashi University, he developed an unusual concept of "slowly creeping serpentine earthquakes"! True, their scenario for the development of "earthquake embryos" in the zone of tension of tectonic plates in Japan and California has not received recognition among the majority of scientists.
But experts, who are still trying to find out the true causes of the Chernobyl disaster, drew attention to the "dragon" Kanamori, and even "assigned" him to blame. Only one thing interfered with the orderly course of their reasoning: the researchers did not know where the "quiet earthquake" came from in Pripyat. Until they figured out to link the two tragedies: most likely, the Kurenevsky apocalypse became the starting point for the subsequent, even more terrible tragedy. In one of the branches of the Pripyat fault, passing just under Babi Yar, a "sleeping serpentine earthquake" Kanamori originated. The Seismic Dragon was awakened by the pressure of hundreds of thousands of tons of brick slurry. The relatively weak shocks of the “newborn” were sufficient to destroy the dam. Then the underground "dragon" that had escaped free, very slowly crawled along the branch of the Pripyat fault and a quarter of a century later, at the end of April 1986, it was right under Pripyat …
Until now, the Kurenevsky apocalypse is surrounded by a huge number of myths. Even the exact number of victims has not been counted. According to official Soviet figures, 145 people died. But today the Ukrainian media are talking about 2,000 and even 5,000 dead. The most accurate and well-reasoned assessments are given by a wonderful Kiev journalist and historian, author of several publications on this topic, Ilya Afanasyev. As a result of long archival searches, he displays a figure of several hundred people. And no more! Disagreement in the reasons for what happened is no less significant. Here you can find mystical legends linking the Kurenevsky apocalypse with the previous closure of the monastery, and myths about the action of the geopathogenic zone in Babi Yar at the site of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the Nazi occupation …
Against this background, the hypothesis of a "slow earthquake" looks quite attractive and warns us about new dangers of man-made disasters. After all, who knows: what if there are countless city gaps, in which people and cars disappear, and there are traces of an underground "dragon"? And maybe it was at this very moment that a “seismic monster” crawls along one of the deep faults in the earth's crust, writhing like a snake, steadily approaching the next megalopolis …
Oleg Arsenov