Residents of a village near Volgograd deprived of water supply for eleventh day

Most residents of the large village of Dubovy Ovrag have been deprived of water supply since December 27, 2021. Officials from the Svetloyarsk District have been ignoring the water supply problems for years, the head of the village states.

In late December, a well in the Dubovy Ovrag village that supplied water to 400 houses, in which 70% of the villagers live, dried up, reports Viktor Akhmetshin, the head of the Dubovy Ovrag village. He notes that even the school has been deprived of the water supply.

“We celebrated the New Year holiday without water supply. And [we will have to celebrate without water supply] Christmas as well. <...> Every day, water is delivered to us in trucks, and now officials try to find someone who would drill a new well. But this is a time-consuming process: they need to find water, develop project, drill, and connect everything ... All the above takes time, and in the meantime people stay without water supply,” Viktor Akhmetshin complained.

The head of the Dubovy Ovrag village notes that since 2019 he has been seeking from the district and regional authorities to solve problems with the water supply. “I have been fighting for water supply for the third year, and I have repeatedly addressed the administration and even the governor. I appealed to them for the first time in 2019. Andrei Bocharov said that he would personally take control over the situation with water supply to the village and help us enter the programme to improve the situation with drinking water supply. Meanwhile, the governor requested the district administration to prepare design and estimate documents. The district administration said that they were short of money, and everything calmed down, despite the instructions from the governor,” stated Viktor Akhmetshin.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on January 6, 2022 at 12:02 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.