An $8Bln Olympic Road With No Direction

CHERESHNYA, Krasnodar Region — Ashot Galstyan moved his family from Krasnodar three years ago to the tiny village of Chereshnya, about 200 kilometers away, in the hopes of raising his children in a more peaceful environment.

The following year, however, Sochi was selected to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, and Galstyan found himself right in the middle of the single-most complicated and expensive part of the construction.

Chereshnya and other villages along the Mzymta River are something of a backwater of Sochi, where farmers tend cattle and grow fruit. The only tourists are rare backpackers bound for the Sochi National Park. But the government’s plan to build a new road, expected to connect Sochi’s airport in the Adler district with the Olympic mountain venues at Krasnaya Polyana, has changed all that. At 260 billion rubles ($8 billion), the 50-kilometer auto and rail link is by far the most expensive item in the Olympic construction plan, or more than half of the state’s roughly $13 billion budget, according to the Transportation Ministry’s most recent figures. At that price, the project would cost 5.2 billion rubles, or $160 million, per kilometer.

The road will roughly follow the Mzymta, passing through mountains, gorges and forests. Construction includes a combined 27 kilometers of tunnels for both the road and the rail routes, as well as 28 bridges. Access roads and bridges have been constructed in the past year, and digging began on the first set of tunnels in May. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, tasked with overseeing the Olympic preparations, was invited to a special ceremony to celebrate the start of work, along with Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachyov and Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin.

But for all the fanfare and magnitude of “the most important Olympic project,” as Kozak dubbed it, no official route for the road has even been determined. Environmentalists say the lack of planning is taking an unnecessarily high toll on the pristine region and that rare trees are being clear cut — even as the builders don’t know whether the areas will ultimately be used.

Residents in the small settlements running along the border zone with Abkhazia say the construction is damaging their property or threatening to evict them from it altogether. Galstyan, whose house sits on the Mzymta, says the river is receding because of gravel extraction upstream and has become filthy with waste from construction and workers.

The wall in his basement is beginning to collapse because of heavy trucks passing by. “This is an insane project,” he said. “I still don’t know whether my house will be demolished.”

And he’s not alone.

Representatives of Russian Railways, which is leading the project, and construction company Most, the main contractor, told The Moscow Times that there was no finalized plan for the road, despite the fact that two tunnels are already being dug.

Moscow-based Most is a frequent contractor for government projects and is behind the development of the 35 billion ruble bridge from Vladivostok to Russky Island, which will host an APEC summit in 2012. According to its web site, Most was founded in the early 1990s by a group of people working on the Baikal-Amur Highway, one of the biggest Soviet infrastructure projects.

“If the Romans built their Colosseum by the rules, they still wouldn’t be finished,” a representative of Most said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy. “Time is important, and we don’t have a year to lose.”

The road must be completed by the end of 2013.

“To this day, you can’t put a finger on the map and say, ‘The road will pass through here, here and here,’” said a representative from state-controlled Russian Railways, also requested anonymity because of company policy. He said final documentation would be ready by the end of 2009 and referred most other questions to Kozak’s office.

“Russian Railways simply executes the government’s orders,” he said.

Kozak’s spokesman Ilya Dzhus said the current work was “preparatory” and that the law regarding Olympic construction allows for preliminary work before planning is completed.

The International Olympic Committee requires that all venues have at least two access routes as a security precaution. The new road will run roughly parallel to an existing road but on the opposite side of the river. The government says the railroad — which isn’t required by the IOC — is needed to make Sochi’s mountains available to the masses as a year-round resort.

Earlier this month, Russian Railways invited scientists and environmentalists to Sochi to hear a presentation on the project, which left some concerned that the road would not only damage the mountain’s ecosystem — it might end up being technically impossible to complete.

“The tunnels are being dug at random in an area with many hidden shafts and drainage systems,” said Sergei Volkov, a geologist who is a consultant on construction of the ski resorts in Krasnaya Polyana. “The company plans to make technical decisions about constructing through these formations once they hit them,” said Volkov, who attended the presentation and is an expert on local topography.

“Before construction can start, geological research should be done for at least a year, but it looks like they did it in two months,” he said.

“It’s a reckless gamble,” said Igor Chestin, Russia director of environmental group WWF, who was also at the presentation. “Just wait for construction to hit the first large sinkhole, and they’ll say they need another 500 billion rubles,” he said.

“We’ll direct our arguments to the prime minister through Dmitry Kozak,” Chestin said, adding that he thought only Vladimir Putin could make a change of plans.

Kozak is on vacation, and it’s not clear whether he plans to discuss the project with Putin any time soon, said Dzhus, his spokesman. So far, the plans remain unchanged, he said.

Aside from concerns that the hit-or-miss digging could significantly run up costs, environmentalists say the work is tearing through one of Europe’s last large stretches of pristine forest.

Taimuraz Bolloyev, president of Olimpstroi, said last month that “green standards” would be used in construction of Olympic sites, while his deputy Stanislav Ananyev said the road’s route would circumvent endangered trees, according to an Olimpstroi news release. It was not clear what the green standards are and who is developing them.

Bolloyev, who was appointed to the post in June, is the corporation’s third chief since 2007. His predecessor, Viktor Kolodyazhny, quit as Sochi mayor in April 2008 to replace Semyon Vainshtok, the former head of Transneft. Both were dismissed amid complaints of mismanagement and cost overruns.

On a recent visit to the construction site in Sochi National Park, workers were clear-cutting a path and using car tires to burn the freshly cut wood, sending billowing black smoke up from the muddy ground. Last month, about 4 hectares of the Caucasian wingnut, a tree listed in Russia’s Red Book of endangered species, was removed nearby.

The next stretch of road runs through a box tree grove, a slowing-growing shrub that is also endangered.

“Such projects need to be officially assessed for environmental impact, which hasn’t been done, and logging endangered species is a criminal offense,” said Andrei Rudomakha, coordinator of Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus. The group stumbled upon the logging of endangered trees last month, he said.

“There has been clear coordination of efforts by Olimpstroi, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry and environmental organizations to minimize the environmental risks,” Dzhus said. He said the Federal Inspection Service for Natural Resources Use, the ministry’s environment watchdog, was responsible for regulating possible logging of endangered species.

But environmentalists said the service has not been doing very well. On Friday, police arrived to halt the logging after discovering that the workers had no documents, said Dmitry Kaptsov, a member of Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus, who was there at the time. An inspector from the service tried to convince the police that the work was legal and declined to confirm that box trees are endangered, Kaptsov said.

An officer in the Sochi police department investigating the incident declined to comment before a criminal case is opened. Calls to the Sochi branch of the resources use service went unanswered.

Seven kilometers upstream from Galstyan’s house, farmer Alexander Korobov says the work is bringing nothing but problems for his village of Akhshtyr. The construction ruined the local well, and now bottled water has to be brought in, he said.

Additionally, federal investigators are looking into property dealings in the town after 10 of the 50 landowners discovered that their deeds had been altered, including Korobov’s plot, which mysteriously became 1,400 square meters smaller.

“A hundred square meters here is worth 560,000 rubles if the state buys it for the Olympics,” he said.

Coupled with corruption, the Olympic gold rush has only made life worse, he said. “I have lived here all my life, and I cannot watch the river being destroyed,” he added.

The Mzymta has already suffered from pollution from construction work along it banks and in Krasnaya Polyana, where there is no sewage system, said Nikolai Kulikov, a water supply expert who sits on the Sochi Environmental Council advising the mayor.

The amount of water available from the Mzymta, which supplies about 40 percent of the greater Sochi area’s needs, has dropped by 30 percent because sewage is disrupting the pipes’ intake, he said. “There will only be enough water for the next two years,” he added.

Locals said visiting officials don’t see the worst of the damage, since construction sites are cleaned up beforehand.

“They were practically licking the roads clean for a week in May, before Kozak’s visit to the first tunnel,” said Korobov, in Akhshtyr. “Now, they tell me Putin is coming in August and I have to get rid of my cows,” he said, adding that he has 50 heads of livestock and makes a living by farming.

“How am I supposed to get rid of them?” he exclaimed. “If they want to kill them, they’ll have to do it themselves.”