The environmental problems of the city of Usolye-Sibirskoye, Irkutsk Region, were not solved for many years and were hushed up. This was announced on Thursday, July 30, by Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting on the environmental situation in this settlement.
He noted that environmental problems in Usolye-Sibirskoye have been accumulating since the 1930s. According to him, it is necessary to determine the order of long-term work to restore the damaged environment.
“A large chemical enterprise operated on this territory, and now the situation is such that the storage facilities for chemical production waste are in an emergency state. To be honest, no one has ever really dealt with this, moreover, this problem, instead of being solved, was essentially hushed up, ”Putin said.
Earlier on the same day, the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that after a meeting on the environmental problems of Usolye-Sibirskoye, Putin will personally talk with the acting governor of the region Igor Kobzev.
The city of Usolye-Sibirskoye, published in July 2019 by Roshydromet on the state of the environment in Russia, was in the list of 20 settlements with the dirtiest air in the country.
In the same month, the head of Rosprirodnadzor, Svetlana Radionova, in an interview with Izvestia, said that her department was seeking the creation of a state program for reclamation of the territory of the Usoliekhimprom enterprise, since there is a huge amount of mercury-containing residues, containers with chemically hazardous substances are stored in the buildings of the plant. She stated that if nothing is done, then there is a chance to get “ecological Chernobyl”.