The Sverdlovsk Region topped the anti-rating of Russian regions, where extreme pollution of drinking water supply sources has been noted over the past ten years.
“Over the past ten years, the Sverdlovsk Region has accounted for the largest number of cases of high and extremely high levels of pollution among the constituent entities of the Russian Federation”, - Kommersant quotes the text of the report.
The researchers note that in the last 10 years the Arkhangelsk, Vladimir, Leningrad, Novgorod regions and Moscow have also been consistently included in the ten least prosperous Russian regions, where the reservoirs used for drinking purposes do not meet the sanitary and epidemiological standards.
"Among the ten regions with the largest number of water samples that do not meet hygienic standards, in different years were Kirov, Kemerovo, Nizhny Novgorod, Penza regions", - the researchers said.
Experts are especially concerned that in the regions where the water is most heavily polluted, the ecological rehabilitation of water bodies (ERWO) has not been carried out for years. This problem is especially relevant for the Vladimir, Leningrad, Arkhangelsk, Novgorod regions. For some reason, the authorities do not allocate money for these purposes.
“At the same time, 1.1 billion rubles, or 24.1% of the total amount of subsidies for these purposes, were allocated from 2013 to 2020 for the rehabilitation of water bodies in Chechnya, samples from which already met sanitary requirements”, - the authors of the report are perplexed.
According to the joint venture, in 2012, when testing water from reservoirs of category I, 21.9% of samples did not meet sanitary and epidemiological requirements, and in 2020 their share increased to 30.1%.
Thus, in Russia virtually every third river on which a drinking water intake is located is poisoned.
Another oddity lies in the fact that in a number of areas where measures to clean up rivers have been formally carried out, and the money has been spent, the results of the samples for some reason did not improve, but worsened. This happened in the Bryansk, Vladimir, Tambov, Tomsk regions and in the Republic of Udmurtia.
In those cases when it was possible to find and bring to justice those responsible for the poisoning of water bodies, it was not easy to compensate for the harm caused to the environment: in 10 years, only 5.2 billion rubles were collected from the violators. This is 23% - less than a quarter of the amount of damage caused to water bodies. In many cases, the reason for the situation was the excessive length of litigation and the numerous facts of the defendants' bankruptcy.
Contrary to the plans and declarations of the authorities to reduce the discharge of poisons into rivers, in a number of regions the discharge of hazardous substances into water bodies is not decreasing, but growing. Most of all polluted effluents are discharged into the voyem in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Magnitogorsk, Vladivostok, Samara, Bratsk, Kazan and Chelyabinsk.
Earlier it was reported that when studying the air quality of Russian cities, Chelyabinsk turned out to be the worst. Rospotrebnadzor ranked the cities participating in the "Clean Air" federal project according to a set of indicators and the severity of aerogenic risks. Following Chelyabinsk, the most alarming ecological situation developed in terms of the sum of ranks as follows: Nizhny Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Norilsk, Novokuznetsk, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Cherepovets, Lipetsk, Bratsk, Chita and Mednogorsk.