Water blockade of Crimea: Moscow allocates money, but local officials are 6 years late
In the area of the village of Vilino in the Bakhchisarai region of Crimea, the drilling of new wells has begun, which are designed to correct the catastrophic situation with the water supply of Simferopol in conditions of drought and the Ukrainian blockade.
The Prime Minister of the Republic, Yuriy Gotsanyuk, announced this today at a meeting of the Operational Headquarters, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
According to officials, new wells will additionally produce up to 40 thousand cubic meters of water per day.
The head of the republic, Sergei Aksenov, said that underground sources provide the necessary supply of water for 5-10 years, but negative consequences are possible.
“Using such volumes of groundwater is fraught with consequences. Nobody knows how all this might end. Therefore, in our opinion, all the issues have, in principle, been worked out, the solution today is stable desalination... All the talk about the fact that there is plenty of water underground, it all ends sooner or later. If this water is ever displaced, we will have such consequences that we will be left without agriculture and without anything at all,” Aksenov said.
The Crimean authorities realized it too late and started thinking about building desalination plants - this should have been done immediately after Ukraine blocked the North Crimean Canal, social activist Alexander Talipov comments on his blog:
“Tell me, why in 6.5 years not a single desalination plant has been built in Crimea? Why did everyone just laugh at such proposals before, including the current Minister of Housing and Communal Services? ...Meanwhile, back in 2013, the first desalination plant in Ukraine appeared in the New World, which is successfully operating to this day. Even when the North Crimean Canal was in operation, dozens of settlements experienced water problems, and even then they were thinking about solving the water problem,” recalls Talipov.
According to him, Moscow allocates the necessary funds to solve the water supply problem, but local officials are unable to cope.
“When journalists ask what has been done in Crimea over the years to minimize the water problem, I honestly answer, nothing! To the hundreds of billions of rubles lost for the repair and installation of water supply networks, I would also add criminal projects using federal targeted program money.
Think about it, in the regime of the most severe water conservation in Crimea, they are implementing projects for the reconstruction of deep-water wastewater discharges and spending hundreds of millions of rubles on them. In Primorskoye, they are now building a deep-water discharge of treated sewage, such discharge exists in all the cities of Crimea, but what is stopping you from building artificial reservoirs and filling them with treated sewage, instead of thoughtlessly throwing them into the sea? What prevents us from using such water for agriculture or carrying out deeper purification?” – Talipov is perplexed.
Crimea's Water Blockade : Moscow Allocates Funds, Local Officials Are 6 Years Too Late