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 As builders worked feverishly to get the Black Sea resort ready
for winter games so closely tied to President Vladimir Putin's
legacy, they failed to notice the effects their work was having on
the village below.
Until the walls of Vorochkova's two-storey home fell. Tell-tale
cracks snaked through neighboring houses.
The 58-year-old housewife now lives in an aluminum shack and is
fighting a legal battle for compensation over damage she blames on
Olympic subcontractors. Other villages near Sochi offer similar
complaints of ruined homes, illegal landfills and broken promises
that their lives would not be poisoned by construction.
"It started slowly with little things, like the poles for the
clothesline were not quite in the same place, the borders of the
garden had moved. Then the front of my house fell off," she said.
Putin is expected to spend more than $50 billion to show off
Russia's modern face at the Games in Sochi, a Black Sea resort on
the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. Moscow promised to set "new
environmental standards" in Olympic construction.
Complaints about construction, along with international concerns
about gay rights and security, threaten Putin's efforts to improve
Russia's image through the games.
The Sochi 2014 organizing committee says construction has minimized
harmful carbon emissions, and companies carrying out construction
say they are sticking to their promises to meet international
standards in protecting the environment.
"The air and water in Sochi have become cleaner than in December
2007," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said this month, praising
the modernization of local transport and environmental protection
work.
But some ecologists say the damage is only the beginning and that
construction may have put the region in the path of potential
ecological disasters, including poisoned drinking water and
flooding.
DUST CLOUD
In the village of Akhshtyr, a few kilometers up the road from
Chereshnya, the wells used by villagers for centuries have dried up
since Russian Railways started digging a quarry in the adjacent
foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.
The quarries mined by Russian Railways, a huge state company run by
Putin's long-time ally and friend Vladimir Yakunin, have provided
rock used in the construction of Olympic venues.
Trucks rumble past every few minutes, carrying stones to the
construction sites below.
One villager, Alexander Koropov, said that when construction
started, local authorities gathered villagers to explain that they
would soon be linked into a natural gas grid and a regional water
system, delivering modern utilities.
"We thought they would bring us civilization, development, but
instead we are now living worse than the Indians did on American
reservations 200 years ago," said Koropov, standing in the orchard
where he used to grow persimmons to sell.
The trucks constantly haul off the rock. Villagers say the trucks
bring in trash from other construction sites, dumping it in the
gorge within walking distance.
A dust cloud covers the village.
Russian Railways says it paid a fine for the illegal dumping and has
since stopped the practice, though residents say trucks continue to
haul trash into the landfill.
Since the wells dried up, the company has delivered almost daily
barrels of water to Akhshtyr residents.
"I don't even care that they didn't keep their promises. It's the
fact that they've made this place unlivable now," said Koropov.
OLYMPIC WASTE
While the trash itself poses no direct danger, rainwater flowing
into the ground and into the nearby Mzymta River, which is used by
Sochi residents for drinking water, is at risk of being contaminated
by the waste, say local environmentalists.
"When the substances accumulate (in the water supply), it can have a
toxic effect, because no one knows exactly what those materials in
the landfill are comprised of, where they have come from," said
Yulia Naberezhnaya, spokeswoman for the Russian Geographical Society
in Sochi.
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Naberezhnaya is one of many Sochi environmental activists who
New York-based Human Rights Watch says have been harassed over
her work. Other environmental activists have had criminal
cases opened against them, including Suren Gazaryan, who received
asylum in Estonia after facing criminal accusations which he called
politically motivated.
In 2008, months after Putin won the right to hold the Games in
Sochi, a U.N. environmental group paid a visit to the area.
After meeting government ministers, Olympic contractor Olympstroy
and local non-governmental groups, the delegation concluded the
Olympic project was aimed at economic development "in which
environmental aspects play only a minor role".
"Any sustained efforts to improve the environmental performance will
probably have only a minor effect compared to the environmental
damage that will be inflicted due to the overall development related
to the Games," said the United Nations Environmental Programme in a
mission report.
In the village of Kudepsta, the territory of a former Soviet
collective farm have been turned into the factory grounds for
several cement producers for Olympic construction. Landfills for
construction waste also dot the grounds.
Rubber boots and orange construction helmets lie half-buried in the
ground.
"Of all the people who work and have businesses on this land, no one
has documents allowing them to work here. Neither the drivers who
deliver the cement out nor the ones who bring the trash in," said
Natalya Vorobyova, who has led several pickets outside the grounds
of the old collective farm.
"EMERGENCY SITUATION"
Kudepsta, like many other down-river villages, lies around the
Imeretinsky lowlands where rain and melted snow drain into the Black
Sea through a series of rivers and swamplands.
According to Russian data, Sochi receives 1.7 meters of rainfall
every year, more than anywhere else in the country apart from a
chain of islands near Japan.
Once a stopping place for migrating birds, much of that area has
been turned into Olympic venues, including the Fisht Stadium, where
the Games' opening and closing ceremonies will be held.
Environmental experts say that Olympic construction which has
consisted of pouring soil into lowland swamps helped cause the
flooding that created a state of emergency in the area in September
and could increase the risk for more flooding.
"Those rains were a test to see how prepared we were for a
relatively normal occurrence. And it showed the extent to which our
Olympic construction failed after getting rid of old drainage
systems and installing new ones that don't work," said Valery
Suchkov, a lawyer specializing in environmental law.
Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska's company Transstroy was
responsible for much of the work to create a foundation for the
Olympic venues.
A spokeswoman for the company, Yelena Stakhiyeva, said Transstroy
had fulfilled its obligations but that another company had been
subcontracted to build the drainage system.
Months after the flooding, residents complain that the ground even
on a sunny day is still damp.
"The ground never really dries, it's been wet for months," said
Kudepsta resident Alexander Tarasovich, poking his boot in to the
soft, black dirt.
For most residents, they see the attention that the Olympics will
bring as a final chance to be heard, but some barely have the
strength left to fight.
"I'm just tired, it's too much," says Vorochkova, with tears in her
eyes, closing the door to her aluminum shack that sits across from
the ruin of her old house.
"All I want to do is sleep," she said.
(Editing by Timothy Heritage and Ralph Boulton)
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