Putin orders all strategic infrastructure to be checked in Russia

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125076947093746049.html

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered a check of Russia’s strategic infrastructure, amid concerns that a massive accident at a hydroelectric power plant in Siberia this week could occur elsewhere.

While Mr. Putin suggested that lack of technological safeguards may be one reason for the disaster, others said decades of underinvestment and structural neglect played a role.

The official death toll from the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant rose to 17 dead and 57 missing Thursday, after divers found three more bodies in the flooded inner reaches of the dam. Moscow has launched a massive search and rescue mission, but officials say that hope for survivors in the frigid waters is dwindling.

Officials say they are still far from understanding the reason for the explosion, which uprooted one of the plant’s 900-ton turbines and flooded the vast hall that housed the power-generating equipment. About 100 workers were in the hall at the time.

Russia’s emergency situations minister, Sergei Shoigu, told a government newspaper that three of the plant’s 10 turbines were destroyed in Monday’s explosion and flood. It will take several years and about $1.2 billion to rebuild the engine room, officials say.

“The accident is a unique one, the source is unclear, we’ve never seen anything like it anywhere,” said Mr. Shoigu.

The accident, and the specter of drowning for the victims, recalls an early mishap in Mr. Putin’s presidency, when in 2000 the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank off the coast of Murmansk, killing all 118 sailors on board.

Mr. Putin’s image as a can-do leader was badly dented when he balked at interrupting a vacation in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to deal with that accident. His critics accused him of not doing enough for the submarine crew, the last of whom suffocated before rescuers could reach the vessel on the ocean floor.

Mr. Putin told his cabinet he would fly Friday to Siberia to visit the site of the hydroelectric power station. In televised remarks, he also ordered that infrastructure throughout the country be checked and upgraded.

“The tragic event at the Sayano-Shushenskaya has clearly shown how much we need to do to ensure the safety of hydropower facilities,” he said. He also stressed the need to make sure that workers observe industrial safety standards, saying that “technological discipline is very low.”

In his interview, Mr. Shoigu condemned Internet bloggers who he said were spreading rumors that the government wasn’t doing enough to rescue workers. “These guys need to be punished severely,” he told the newspaper Rossisskaya Gazeta.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported Thursday that police in Siberia arrested the editor of the online newspaper “Novy Fokus,” for allegedly spreading false information that defamed the plant’s management and the rescue effort.

His Web site suggested there were survivors to the initial flood who were trapped in pockets of air and banged on surfaces in a bid to contact rescuers, Interfax said. Officials deny getting such signals from survivors.

Sayano-Shushenskaya, which is owned by state-controlled RusHydro, is Russia’s largest power plant, supplies about 10% of Siberia’s energy and is a major source for the region’s metals plants.

Experts say the plant suffered from underinvestment in the post-Soviet collapse. Russia’s electricity monopoly, UES, had announced a major spending program that would have upgraded the plant’s safety standards, but the project hadn’t been completed at the time of the accident.

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no-one knows what actually caused this huge blast and the mess its delivered after shows how fragile some infrastructures are in russia/siberia (was this a terrorist attack or a false flag?)..and dont they hate the bloggers as well..anyone spreading information they dont like is an enemy of the state..welcome to the new world people

“These guys need to be punished severely,” he told the newspaper Rossisskaya Gazeta.”

401

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~ by seeker401 on August 22, 2009.