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WATER POLITICS

Via Windows on Eurasia, an interesting comment on the state of Russia’s water resources.  Despite the country having the largest amount of fresh water of any country on earth, much of the water coming out of taps in that country’s cities and towns contains so many harmful substances that many people there are turning to filters and bottled water.  As the article notes:

“…Russia has enormous reserves of fresh water but is experiencing “a severe deficit of pure drinking water…

This situation is particularly acute not only in places long known for high levels of pollution like Kaliningrad, Russia’s non-contiguous region on the Baltic Sea, she writes, but in places like the North and the Far East where most residents and outsiders assume the water supply is in far better shape.

In Irkutsk oblast, which is located at the southern edge of Lake Baikal, the largest by volume fresh water body of water in the world, she continues, nearly one in six of the 353 sources of water for residents does not correspond to official standards of chemical and/or micro-biological content.

…The reasons for this situation are numerous, but the three most important are surface reservoirs not adequately protected from runoff from industrial sites and sewage disposal units, the lack of modern treatment facilities at many of them, and especially the poor quality of pipes carrying the water from the reservoirs and treatment facilities to end users.

The problem of surface reservoirs is a longstanding one in Russia as well as in other countries, but the problems in the Russian case are particularly acute because in Soviet times, reservoirs were constructed near industrial plants in order to save money on the transport of water, an arrangement that virtually guaranteed contamination.

These difficulties are compounded in Russia today, experts told Metrofanova, because water treatment facilities continue to use outdated technologies that not only do not remove many of the most harmful substances from the water but in fact actually introduce additional ones that may be even more threatening to health than those they remove.

And finally, more than half of the pipes in the city of Irkutsk, for example, are in such sad shape that they cannot prevent the water they carry from being contaminated with chemicals and biological elements before it reaches consumers because industrial plants are not careful in disposing waste and because the city’s sewage system is in equally bad shape.

…Given that, Metrofanova says, it is critically important that Russia upgrade its reservoirs, water treatment facilities, and pipeline systems. But such things, even though they would help to prolong the lives of Russians, seldom attract the attention of political leaders who typically prefer to spend money on more high-profile issues.”