The town of Karabash, from the Russian province of Chelyabinsk, 870 miles from Moscow, is one of the most polluted places on Earth. The copper factories built more than 100 years ago keep transforming the area into a living hell – a kind of Chernobil with inhabitants.
The people living there have nowhere to go and are closer to death with every breath they take. The residential areas, the restaurants or cinemas are now resembling death-haunted places, and people hardly live more than 45 years.
In the instant that the factories start emitting gases in the atmosphere, the inhabitants lose their conscience, get dizzy and nauseous. The forests, rivers and soil have a yellowish color because of iron, whose concentration is 500 times higher than normal limits.
Plants do not grow for at least 100 meters from Sak-Elga, the river crossing the region. Dead birds, desert-like landscapes and a generally poisonous atmosphere haunts the place. Most of the Karabash inhabitants suffer from cancer, tumors, strokes or congenital malformations. As I said earlier, the life expectancy is 45 years on average.
It’s hard to believe people still live like that in the 20th century. There was a time when Karabash had been named “the most polluted place on Earth” by UNESCO.
Ironically, the local authorities recently decided that they should hire search engine experts to manipulate the rankings in Google and Yandex, for when others would search for keywords like “Karabash ecology” or “most polluted city in the world,” to turn the results to positively-speaking pages, and if not possible, at least to neutral ones.
Sad. Just google for pictures, these are only a few:
[via rol.ro,russiatrek]
