Moscow Heating Pipes Create Lethal Traps

MOSCOW — Marina Yarovov was walking her two dogs in a field near her apartment when the earth opened up beneath her and she fell into a pit of muddy, boiling water.

In agony, she tried to climb out of the hole as a friend ran for help. But within minutes, the 43-year-old mother of two was dead--boiled alive in the water that heats the homes and shops of her neighborhood through a vast subterranean network of pipes.

Yarovov, who died March 11, is one of the latest casualties of Moscow’s decaying Soviet-era public facilities, which were built on a grand scale but are now in constant need of repair. Officials say they have little money to maintain the aging underground pipes, which bring boiling water from central factories to heat the city’s apartments, offices and schools.

“Life is tough enough in Russia without such lethal traps,” said Yarovov’s angry husband, Igor Yarovov, vowing to pursue legal action against city officials. “It’s not wartime, and someone has to take responsibility for people dying in the streets of Moscow in broad daylight.”

When the pipes leak, hot water can saturate the soil so thoroughly that the weight of a person walking above is enough to turn the ground into a seething sinkhole.

City officials acknowledge that Moscow has become a “minefield” and predict that without a sudden infusion of cash to repair the pipes, more people will die in the same grisly fashion.

“People will, I am afraid, keep falling in such pits in the future,” said a spokeswoman for a city heating agency, Mosenergo. She asked not to be identified further. “I realize that such problems relegate Russia to the status of a Third World country, not a civilized industrial power. But for now we are helpless and can only recommend that people be more careful about where they walk.”

Such explanations are not enough for the Mkrtumyan family. Six weeks ago, 10-year-old Artyom Mkrtumyan was walking to a store in his neighborhood when the ground dissolved under his feet and he fell into a boiling pit. His father, Vladimir, jumped into the 225-degree water to rescue his son, but it was too late. Artyom died 11 days later. The elder Mkrtumyan, scalded from the waist down, died two weeks after his son.

“I hate the country where human life costs nothing, where children die and no one is responsible,” said Galina Mkrtumyan, the boy’s mother. “All the rights that have been declared exist only on paper. I am scared to live in a city where the city administration is waging a clandestine war on its own people.”

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Both families have pledged to sue the city--a first in this kind of tragedy, Mkrtumyan said. But the legal system offers so little recourse for victims of negligence that even if they win, they are likely to get almost nothing in compensation. In the U.S., by contrast, a victim of just a scalding hot cup of coffee at McDonald’s won a judgment that ended up being worth more than half a million dollars.

“An end should be put to this apocalyptic scenario of people getting boiled alive right in the streets of a huge megalopolis,” Yarovov said Monday, the day of his wife’s funeral. “We will make sure that the culprits of the tragedy--the officials who have neglected all reports about the leaking hot-water pipes--are punished.”

For the past four years, Yarovov said, steam has risen from the field where residents of their neighborhood regularly walk their dogs. “Every winter, the surroundings looked like Disneyland--steam coming out of the ground and trees fantastically decorated with icicles and frost,” he said.

He and his neighbors frequently reported that the underground pipes were leaking, but the break was never repaired, he said. Instead, the city sent dump trucks with sand and gravel to fill cracks in the ground.

When Marina Yarovov fell into the sinkhole, her dogs jumped aside and were unharmed. But even after her body was removed, the dogs refused to leave the scene.

“I don’t think there is anything worse than being boiled alive,” Yarovov said. “I try to imagine what she was feeling and what thoughts must be crossing her mind when she fell into this pit of boiling water. Why did she have to die like that?”

The Mosenergo spokeswoman said her office has received a flood of angry calls from the public since Yarovov’s death but was helpless to act because the agency’s customers--Moscow’s industries, institutions, businesses and residents--rarely pay their bills.

Mosenergo is millions of dollars in debt, she said, and crews sent out to repair leaks keep working, even though they have not been paid for nearly a year.

“To say that the current state of the heating network in Moscow is disastrous is a major understatement,” she said. “All this creates a situation where the entire city looks like a huge minefield and one has to think twice before making another step. But people will have to learn to live and work in a minefield, because there is no end in sight.”

After Artyom Mkrtumyan fell into the pit in his neighborhood, his mother--an architect and construction engineer--began her own investigation of the city’s practices.

To her horror, she found that Moscow started saving money 10 years ago by halting the installation of protective concrete casings around heating pipes--devices intended to prevent water from saturating the ground in the event of leaks. She said one official acknowledged that 80% of the city’s heating pipes no longer have protective casings.

“What he told me made my hair stand on end,” she said. “The city needed to economize, and they chose something no one could see. No one even cared that by doing this they put people’s lives in danger. In fact, this has become a deadly time bomb that has already gone off.”

Georgy A. Neiman, the Mosenergo official in charge of the pipeline, acknowledged that the agency stopped installing protective casings but said it was not to save money but because the city recently switched to a new type of pipe that is more resistant to corrosion.

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Since 1996, an average of four children a year have died under the same circumstances as her son, Mkrtumyan said. The total death toll is unknown because there are no reliable records.

“Enough money is found for useless construction projects, for the tacky illumination of the city to make foreign businessmen feel at home, for throwing posh and unjustifiably expensive celebrations,” she said. “But there is no money to fix the leaky old pipes.”

Oksana Terekhina, manager of the store where Artyom and his father were headed that morning, said she had seen pools of water collecting early in the day and reported it to Mosenergo, the city agency. No crews responded.

Two hours later, she heard shouting outside and saw Vladimir Mkrtumyan in a cloud of steam pulling his son from a newly opened pit. She quickly called for an ambulance.

“He was basically a living, swollen skeleton crying in pain and calling for his mother, calling for help, calling for someone to ease his intolerable pain,” she said. “I would not think twice before throwing them [the people responsible] into a pit like we had here. They must feel what a child boiling alive feels like.”

Artyom’s body was so disfigured that the nurses refused to let his mother see him in the hospital; he was buried in a sealed coffin.

“He died a death that even the most hardened criminals and repeat offenders are not sentenced to in barbaric and uncivilized countries,” Galina Mkrtumyan said. “My life has been ruined, reduced to rubble. What I feel now is terrible emptiness, emptiness all around me, and I am standing on the brink of an abyss.”

Alexei Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.