Moscow saves energy as temperatures plummet

MOSCOW: Moscow switched to a "strict" energy conservation program yesterday and another two people froze to death as overnight temperatures plunged below - 30 C in the capital and to substantially colder levels elsewhere in the country.

Students at state primary schools were allowed to stay home at parents' discretion and the stalwart Kremlin ceremonial guard service said it may halve shifts around the eternal flame at the foot of the Kremlin walls to 30 minutes because of the cold.

Another two people died of hypothermia on the streets of Moscow and 15 others were hospitalized as a result of exposure to the cold, Interfax news agency said, while forecasters said temperatures would drop even further in the coming days.

Television news broadcast footage of homeless people crouched or sprawled over steam vents or huddling in entrances to train stations to keep warm and ITAR-TASS news agency said around 40 trolley buses stalled overnight in Moscow as a result of the freezing temperatures.

More than 200 factories in the Moscow area were informed on Tuesday they would have their power cut to conserve energy and the business daily Vedomosti said that from yesterday Moscow "is switching to a strict energy conservation regime."

This would mean targeted power cutbacks to various businesses as well as turning off electricity for billboard advertisements, casinos and gaming halls housed in buildings adorned with piles of neon lights and at construction sites that use powerful floodlights for nigh time work.

In a city normally paralyzed by traffic, up to 400,000 Muscovites found their cars would not start and took the metro to work instead. The 9 million people who use the system routinely just grimaced and bore the extra load.

An editor at Vedomosti said the lights were off and only the computers were working in the newsroom. "It looks a bit like an orchestra at the moment, with only the players' music stands alight," he said.

Tales of burst pipes, electric-heater fires, icy road accidents and homeless people frozen solid will become commonplace as the week rumbles glacially on. Cold, known in Russia by the phlegmy word "kholod," is a familiar but indefatigable enemy and 107 Muscovites have died from it since October.

For the thousands of homeless who roam the city's streets, such freezing temperatures are a death sentence. At the weekend, the police were ordered to stop their traditional practice of ejecting homeless people from underpasses and metro stations and told, instead, to help them find state-run shelters.

Prior to announcement of the latest two deaths in Moscow, officials said that eight people died on Tuesday throughout Russia as a result of the frigid weather, caused when Arctic air from Siberia swept over the western "European" part of Russia where most of the country's population is.

In Russia's Volga region, six people drowned when the ice broke under a minibus that was crossing a frozen river near the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The minibus was driving on the ice at a point normally passable in the summer.

"There were 15 people in the vehicle, nine managed to escape and six drowned," an official with the Emergency Ministry told the Interfax news agency.

State-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom warned power companies throughout the European part of Russia that it might have to reduce gas deliveries by up to 50 per cent because of the cold, a spokesman for Russia's power grid RAO EES, Margarita Nagoga, told Interfax.

Source: China Daily