russians have learned to fear August. It has repeatedly delivered disasters. This year, a catastrophe on August 17 at Sayano-Shushenskaya, Russia’s biggest dam on the Yenisey River, killed 75 people. The accident continues to baffle experts, while accusations are ricocheting through industry and the government.
Sayano-Shushenskaya, an enormous hydropower plant that belongs to RusHydro, now sits idle, water passing through the giant dam without powering the generators, all ten of which were destroyed when the machine room was flooded. One of the giant generator units exploded out of its housing due to extreme pressure, and water rushed into the machine room, where the night shift and a repair crew was working. Seventy-five of the 105 people working at the station died in cold and oily water over the next few hours.
The Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostekhnadzor), the technical watchdog for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, delayed publication of its investigative report until early October, posted it on their official website on October 3, then took it offline after several hours. The 140-page report listed various causes for the accident, including those with roots in the 1980s. The list of people with direct or indirect responsibility included many managers of RusHydro, and even Anatoly Chubais, who headed United Energy Systems, the power monopoly broken up and reprivatized several years ago. The report said that Chubais and five other officials were responsible for “creating the conditions that contributed to the accident.”
“The truth is that the station’s units were used in conditions for which they were not designed,” said Rostekhnadzor head Nikolai Kutyin. The investigation uncovered evidence that the station was signed into operation in 2000 despite numerous flaws. When the lid blew off of one of the generators, causing the machine room to flood, six of the 49 studs attaching the unit’s lid to the foundation were not present, Kutyin said at a press conference.
Interestingly, the Audit Chamber checked the station in 2007 and issued a report the following year, in which it said that 85 percent of the station’s equipment was worn-out, obsolete and needed to be replaced. Critics note that aging Soviet infrastructure, combined with the desire of new owners to milk maximum profits, ought to warn of future, similar accidents elsewhere.
“There was so much talk of the need to renovate large infrastructural projects, of the fact that these objects will become worn out in the 21st century, technologically speaking,” said Audit Chamber head Sergei Stepashin, in a September press conference, “and Sayano-Shushenskaya is one of the younger of these projects, built in 1978.”
Aside from drawing attention to the exhausted state of Russia’s energy infrastructure, the accident also showed how stations contract repair work out to unskilled laborers, in order to cut costs. Youtube.com videos show the panicked station managers fleeing in the first moments after the accident, leaving chaos in their wake instead of giving clear directions that might have saved lives of those left behind in the flooded room. The General Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee is still investigating the role of management in handling the post-accident situation.
It will cost about R40 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) to repair the station. RusHydro has allocated just over R20 billion of its own finances for repairs through 2010. It is asking the government for more money, but no decision has yet been made. The state owns 65 percent of RusHydro, but the company’s stock is also traded on the London Stock Exchange (where it has lost 22% of its value since the accident).
Although Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko promised that firings would follow in the wake of the investigations findings, no RusHydro managers have yet been let go. A source in the Investigative Committee told Interfax that Rostekhnadzor’s report has only “informational” value, as the criminal case opened after the accident would require a court investigation.
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