The prosecutor's office of the Irkutsk region began an investigation due to an accident at a boiler house in the Ugolshchikov microdistrict in Tulun. The press service of the department reports this.
According to Gismeteo, the weather in the city with a population of 40 thousand people is currently hovering around minus 35-40 degrees. The governor of the Irkutsk region, Igor Kobzev, introduced a high alert regime in Tulun due to the fact that “the temperature in a number of houses has dropped.”
The Minister of Housing Policy and Energy of the region, Anatoly Nikitin, came to the scene of the accident. According to him, the smoke exhaust motor on one of the boilers failed, and a leak was discovered on the other. Kobzev reported in his telegram channel that before the start of the heating season, Rostechnadzor recognized the boiler house where the accident occurred as unprepared for the cold.
Teleinform writes that the authorities plan to temporarily house freezing Tulun residents in local schools and an agricultural college.
The day before, on December 10, the Siberian Express telegram channel reported that in the comments under the posts of the governor of the Irkutsk region, messages appeared from residents of Tulun, in which they write about “slightly warm” radiators in their houses.
“Frosts are down to -50, and in apartments no higher than 15 degrees, 4 microdistricts have been freezing since yesterday. <…> boiler room equipment is out of order, so yesterday Mr. Ugolshchikov’s boiler room was out of order, since the evening the batteries have been a little warm, and we have 50 for a minute, today the batteries are also a little warm, we are warming ourselves with heaters,” says one of the comments (spelling and the author's punctuation has been preserved).
Because of the frost, utility accidents occurred in different regions of Russia. In the city of Berdsk near Novosibirsk, three heating mains have burst over the past few days. The authorities of the Kirov region registered 51 accidents on utility networks in the region. In Saratov, after an accident on a heating pipeline, heating was turned off in 140 apartment buildings.
Last Friday, December 8, residents of the village of Kalinino near Abakan came to the airport to warm up due to a power outage. According to them, they “saw no other way out of the situation.”