Town Sacrifices Health for Jobs

KARABASH, Ural Mountains -- The mind-set of the residents of this small town in the birch-dotted foothills of the Urals is summed up by a big black headline in the multicolored brochure that city fathers hand out to visitors: "Karabash - Black Spot on the Planet."


Their log dwellings and small apartment buildings are surrounded by black heaps of industrial waste 13 meters high. Vegetation is sparse, the air smells acrid, and in winter the snow is flecked with black grit.


More than the landscape is devastated. Two-thirds of the children suffer from lead, arsenic or cadmium poisoning, according to health experts here, near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. Studies show high rates of congenital defects, central nervous system disorders and cancer.


Regional officials blame all this on a 90-year-old copper-smelting plant, whose five chimneys loom over a polluted pond that schoolchildren trek over when it is frozen. The plant's emissions are so hazardous that even the Soviet government closed it in 1987.


But in April 1998, the Karabash Copper Smelting Works reopened. The town's residents were desperate for jobs, and the government was desperate for tax dollars. "We didn't have any alternative," said Alexander Gavrilov, chief of the region's health service.


Such is Russia's unpalatable choice. A cleaner environment was one of the promises of the post-Soviet era. But 10 years later, environmental programs are bereft of funds. Factories are dirtier than ever, and workers are more afraid of losing their jobs than losing their health.


The only difference in towns like Karabash is residents now know that the factories are sickening their children. "If you are dying of hunger, what do you care if you will die of cancer in 10 years?" said Vladimir Tsirkunov, an environmental specialist with the World Bank. "The environment is an abandoned child."


Many Russian cities, left to finance their own cleanup projects, find the cheapest fixes too expensive. Lori Freer, director of environmental programs for the Moscow office of the United States Agency for International Development, estimates low-cost antipollution devices - covers for factory furnaces and cement plant filters - could save 1,700 lives a year in Volgograd, an industrial city of 1 million. But the $100,000 price tag is out of the city's reach.


Several of Russia's most polluted cities are in the heavily industrialized Urals region. In Karabash, a town of 15,000 about two hours south of Yekaterinburg, residents have all but given up hope of government help.


Towering black heaps of slag line the main road, encircle the factory and spill into back yards. Slag, laced with lead, arsenic and cadmium, is the waste from copper smelting furnaces after raw copper is extracted from ore.


Over the decades, the town has been overwhelmed by it, as the Karabash Copper Smelting Works turned out copper for ammunition in the 1940s and later for foil, electrodes and terminals. The plant's chimneys pour out particulates that rain down into the soil.


When regional officials shut the factory in 1987, throwing as many as 3,500 people out of work, the idea was to stimulate the owners to modernize. The government relocated families who lived closest to the chimneys and handed out food supplements to help counteract effects of heavy metal poisoning in children. More ambitious plans called for replacing the contaminated top layer of soil.


"But you know what happened in our country," Gavrilov said. Regional officials finally decided the only potential source of funds was the plant, and allowed it to reopen, with somewhat more efficient filters.


"Maybe you can help get some humanitarian aid for the people," Gavrilov said. "The problem is almost unembraceable."