Moscow Temperatures Sink, Leaving Two Dead; Power Cuts Possible
Jan. 17 -- Temperatures in Moscow plunged 20 degrees overnight toward the lowest in five decades, leaving at least two people dead and a dozen in hospital.
Muscovites woke up to readings of minus 23 Celsius (minus 9.4 Fahrenheit) this morning as a cold front blew in from western Siberia, according to the Russian Meteorological Bureau. Temperatures may reach as low as minus 34 Celsius in the coming days, which would be the lowest since 1947.
``I am wearing five coats today and three pairs of trousers, I am sitting on a heater and I am still cold,' Yury Markachev, a vendor selling pirated movies at a kiosk in an underpass near the Kremlin, said in an interview. ``No one is stopping to buy DVDs today. We haven't had cold like this for years.'
While Moscow is used to a harsh winter, the temperature today is 14 degrees below the average for January, Russia's coldest month. Deaths from the cold since October stand at 107, Interfax reported. Some companies are being forced by supplier OAO Mosenergo to slash power consumption. The municipal government has banned digging and drilling work to avoid rupturing pipes.
The freeze is expected to get worse. Before moving over Moscow, the cold front reduced readings in the western Siberian city of Tomsk to minus 50 Celsius, the coldest for a century.
``We haven't set any records yet,' Natalya Yershova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Meteorological Bureau, said in a telephone interview today in Moscow. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Moscow was minus 42 degrees Celsius in 1940.
Two people died from hypothermia during the past 24 hours and 12 people were hospitalized with overexposure to the cold, said Lyubov Zhomova, a spokeswoman for the city public health authority.
Power Cuts
Mosenergo warned five weeks ago of power cuts in the city of 10 million, Europe's largest, should temperatures hit minus 20.
Consumers are ranked according to ``social importance' and those at the bottom end of the scale have been told to cut power use, said Tatyana Milyaeva, spokeswoman for RAO Unified Energy System, Mosenergo's parent company.
``Industrial consumers are receiving notification about possible power cuts,' Milyaeva said in a telephone interview. Restrictions won't apply to residential buildings, hospitals, transportation providers and ``strategic enterprises' such as military and defense installations, she said.
Mosenergo and Unified Energy introduced the ranking system after the utilities were blamed for two days of rolling blackouts in May left that fifth of Moscow without power, shut down subway lines disrupted water supplies and halted stock trading. President Vladimir Putin blamed Mosenergo's management, prompting the company's chief executive and financial officers to resign.
No Lights
The company coped with the first wave of peak usage last night and this morning ``without failures, accidents or restricting consumers,' Unified Energy said an e-mailed statement today.
Vedomosti and the Moscow Times, newspapers owned by Independent Media Sanoma Magazines, the Russian unit of Finnish media company SanomaWSOY Oyj, were told to cut consumption by 94 percent between 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. today, said Independent Media administrative director Yelena Yeliseyeva.
The newspapers will work without lights during that time and use only enough electricity to keep their computers running, the Moscow Times reported today.
The Moscow Stock Exchange, the city's second-tier market, halted share trading at 2:00 p.m. local time because it was concerned computers may fail after Mosenergo warned that power supply may be cut, according to the exchange's Web site.
Economic Expansion
Mosenergo is struggling to keep up with booming demand for power in Moscow, where the economy is expanding at rate of about 16 percent a year, more than twice the national average. Mosenergo last month began construction of a $350 million generator, the biggest in the city, to increase production by 4.5 percent and directly supply 400,000 apartments by 2010.
Normal consumption in the Russian capital is about 14,000 megawatts per day this time of year, the Moscow Times reported. Maximum capacity is 16,000 megawatts, Milyaeva said.
In the event of a shortage, the city will pull the plug on electronic outdoor advertisements first and then target other enterprises not essential to the city's subsistence, Interfax reported, citing unidentified City Hall officials. |
