Part of an apartment building collapsed in a central Kazakhstan town overnight on January 1, killing at least nine people, including three children.
Authorities have said preliminary investigations suggest the accident may have been caused by the explosion of a heating boiler. These kind of heating units are crucial to survival in towns like Shakhan, in the Karaganda region, where temperatures in winter can drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius.
Officials say that part of the apartment blocked destroyed in the collapse was home to 25 people.
Homes in Shakhan, a town of around 8,000 people, were at some stage provided with heating from a central boiler, but that has broken down and not been replaced by the government. Committees managing apartment buildings are in such situations compelled to install basements with autonomous heating systems, which are fueled with coal, wood or paper and can pose significant risks to residents, as in this case.
The deputy Karaganda regional governor Andrei Lyapunov told media that he had appealed to the National Economy Ministry for funds to resolve the heating problem in Shakhan, but that progress was hindered by money shortages.
“A project blueprint was developed. It was examined by state experts. The budget was about 2.8 billion tenge in 2014 [NB. $15 million at mid-2014 rates and $8.3 million now],” Lyapunov said.
But that money was not enough to finance a project to provide heating to around 100 apartment blocks, he said.
“This cannot be done quickly. Especially as the the town has a very distended heating grid and homes are very distant from one another. This is why building a [central] boiler takes a certain amount of time,” Lyapunov said.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev expressed his condolences over the death and ordered local authorities to provide people with every assistance necessary. A state of emergency has been declared in Shakhan and a public fund established to provide public assistance.
Karaganda is no stranger to shoddy housing. Much indignation was aroused in 2012 over an incident in the settlement of Besoba, where a resident fortuitously filmed the sudden collapse of a tall residential building. Nobody was killed on that occasion as the building had already evacuated over concerns for its integrity.
Aigerim Toleukhanova is a journalist and researcher from Kazakhstan.
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