Russian officials try to keep smelly toxic cloud hush-hush

When a thick layer of mysterious, orange smoke blanketed the city of Chelyabinsk last week, terrified residents shuttered themselves indoors. Schoolchildren even missed their first day of class. Local authorities, however, did their very best to downplay the disaster.

The smoke came from a cargo train car at the Chelyabinsk railroad station. Officials said that it was caused by leaks in 20 one-litre bottles of bromine, a highly toxic chemical commonly used in insecticide, fumigants and flame retardants. This led to about 50 people being hospitalized for poisoning and chemical burns, according to officials. The real scale of the disaster, however, appears to be much worse. Data from a federal investigation, leaked to the press by doctors on Wednesday, shows that in reality, 6,000 bromine bottles were involved, and that several hundred people suffered serious health problems.

This region of Russia is often described as the most polluted region in the country. It is a centre of metallurgic industrial activity, as well as home to Mayak, one of the country’s biggest nuclear facilities, infamous for a major accident in 1957. Two of the region’s main urban centers made it into the Top 10 list of Russia’s most polluted cities.

The local government is understandably unhappy about this, and has decided to improve the region’s image. At the end of July, renowned anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny discovered that the Chelyabinsk regional government had put out a call for bids to help clean up its online reputation. It hoped to find a specialized company to find a way to make top search engines show results for positive or at least neutral articles about the region when people searched for phrases like “radiation in Chelyabinsk,” Mayak accident” or “Chelyabinsk region ecology.”

"There’s an unspoken taboo around discussing ecological problems"

On the day of the accident, I was far away from the railroad station, but I could still smell the chemicals. The situation is now being hushed up by the authorities. There’s an unspoken taboo around discussing ecological problems because it allegedly damages the region’s reputation. Local officials tried to hide the accident altogether during the first hours, but people started talking and the media picked up on the story. It was impossible to believe that just 20 litres of bromine could cause such a huge cloud. This was obviously caused by a much larger quantity.

However, the general ecological situation in the region is gradually getting better. The air pollution is still much higher than normal, but in the past years some big factories have started to implement air cleaning programs. Unfortunately, many other factories are still lagging. A lot more has to be done. I think the money the regional government wants to spend on cleaning up the region’s image would be much better spent cleaning up the region’s environment. Real air and water clean-ups would improve Chelyabinsk’s image much more than doctoring Google search results.”

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