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By Brendan Cole
Senior Reporter
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Residents in the Moscow region have expressed their outrage after the heating in their homes stopped working amid sub-zero temperatures as their top official reportedly took more than a week to speak publicly about the incident.
At least 21,000 residents of around 180 high-rise buildings in the city of Podolsk, around 30 miles south of central Moscow, were left freezing after the power was knocked out in their homes when a heating main burst at the Klimovsk Specialized Ammunition Plant on Thursday January 4, Russian media reported.
It is an especially tough time to be left without heating with a cold snap over this New Year period saw the mercury in the Moscow region plummet to -25 C (-13 F) on Monday morning.
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Moscow regional authorities have blamed utility problems on abnormal frosts with the average daily temperature up to -15 C degrees (5 F) below normal. There were also heating problems which started on January 2 in buildings in nearby towns, including Khimki, Solnechnogorsk, Balashikha and Lyubertsy.
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Video posted on the Telegram channel "Ostorozhna, Moskva" (Beware Moscow) showed residents staging a picket in the town square demanding the power be restored, with one sign reading "We're freezing, punish those responsible."
The woman recording the video described how police dispersed the protesters, saying: "I wish they'd brought back heating as fast as they dispatched the cops."
Examining his website and social media accounts, independent news outlet Agentstvo reported that the governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, did not issue a statement about the heating problems until Sunday, describing the situation as "difficult." The outlet noted that his last public appearance of 2023 was on December 29, although he did visit the family of a soldier who had been killed in Ukraine on January 6.
Vorobyov said that the private owners of the plant responsible for the outage had fled and he would file a complaint to Russia's Investigative Committee, which has opened a criminal case over not meeting safety requirements.
Soon after Vorobyov's posts, comments were disabled on his Telegram channel after several hundred complaints about the heating, Agentstvo reported.
A video post on Monday showed Vorobyov meeting with residents whom he said would be compensated and would not face heating bills for January. He also said that repairs were underway to return the heating "as soon as possible." Newsweek has contacted Vorobyov's office for comment by email.
But a Change.org petition which, as of early Monday morning had been signed by nearly 4,000 people also demanded punishment for officials responsible, including the mayor of Podolsk, Grigory Artamonov, and the heads of local utility companies.
"The lack of hot water and electricity creates huge problems and risks for residents, affecting their quality of life and health in some houses, batteries and pipes have burst, apartments are flooding," said the petition.
Adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko wrote about the heating problems afflicting Moscow on X. "While Russian authorities and propagandists were making up horror stories about Europe freezing without Russian gas, they completely forgot about their own citizens," he wrote on Sunday.
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