Secretive Siberian City: Pollution

I heard a new report the other night about a asection of Russian that is a huge dead zone. Trees are dead. Children are ill. The air is hard to breathe.
The report said the highly polluted area is as large as Germany.

From a distance it looks like a front of bad weather moving in and obscuring the otherwise pristine Arctic sky.

But drive closer and the source of the long streams of "cloud" flowing over the city and far beyond becomes clear.

To blame are the clusters of huge chimneys at three smelting plants which surround Norilsk.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the chimneys pump out a toxic cocktail of pollutants which the company responsible openly admits is mostly sulphur dioxide.

news.bbc.co.uk...

Background
en.wikipedia.org...

As a result, the Norilsk region is the home of the world's largest pollution induced forest decline. For forty kilometers around the smelters, the soil contains 10-1000 times the normal background level of heavy metals.

As a result, the snow is yellow and black.

As a result, move to Norilsk to work, and your life expectancy will drop by ten years.

www.sprol.com...

Background on the mine
www.minesandcommunities.org...

The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, May 30, 2001
www.francnord.ca...

It seems to me that no matter what the US or any other country does to clean up its environment, other countries are so badly polluting the earth that our efforts have no real effect on cleaning the environemnt.


[edit on 7-4-2007 by DontTreadOnMe]

No, no, no!!!!

Just because this region of Russia is terrible (and it's not secretive, a couple hundred thousand or so people live there and its been featured in mainstream Western magazines such as National Geographic), does not mean Americans should stop giving a damn about the environment.