Relief from heat eludes Muscovites
By Yonatan Pomrenze, NBC News Producer
MOSCOW – If you want an air conditioner in Moscow, you’re too late.
Russia’s heat wave is almost one month old, and is showing no signs of letting up. Having lived extensively in New York and the Middle East, temperatures hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit are nothing strange for me, but it’s a different experience in Moscow.
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The toughest part may be the scarcity of air-conditioning here, especially in residential homes. Maybe I should count myself lucky that the heat wave has coincided with the annual two-week hot water shut-off in my building (so that the utility company can do repairs on the pipes), as a freezing cold bath seems to be the only way to cool down at the end of the day.
Air conditioner suppliers caught by surprise by the high temperatures have run out of stock, and home appliance stores have back-orders of up to three weeks (two companies declined our request to film people looking for air-conditioners in their stores because they didn’t want us to show empty shelves).
Even though most of my friends back in the U.S. are knowledgeable enough not to ask me anymore if it snows in Moscow in the summer, the heat wave has still taken some tourists by surprise.
“We knew it was hot, but we didn’t expect it to be this miserably hot,” said Doak Simpson, a 48-year-old Motorola employee from Miami visiting Moscow with his family. “We’re from the land of air-conditioning. You can get out of it, and here there’s just no escaping it.”
Swimming – for better or worse
Muscovites still do a pretty good job of escaping it, though. Any part of Moscow that has water – fountains, the river, even barge canals – has been full of people swimming and sunbathing.
But the Russian Emergency Ministry’s web site shows perhaps the harshest measure of the heat wave: the death toll. Over 2,000 people have drowned in Russia since June 1. And this past Monday broke an unfortunate record: 71 people drowned in a 24-hour period.
According to Vadim Seryogin, a ministry official, many of the cases are due to people swimming while drunk.
“Of course, it’s good to swim during such hot days,” said Kseniya Kurus, a 19-year-old international law student, when told about the grim statistics. “But we shouldn’t drink alcohol during the summer. It’s dangerous.”
EPA/Yuri Kochetkov
Young Muscovites find some relief from the sweltering heat in a fountain at the All-Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow, Russia, on Friday.
And there’s no relief in sight. Forecasts predict the coming week to potentially break Moscow’s record of 98 degrees Fahrenheit.
And the heat goes beyond Moscow – it has also slammed Russia’s farmland with a crippling drought. Twenty-three grain-producing regions have declared a state of emergency and the Russian Grain Union reported that the drought has destroyed over 22 million acres of crops. Some forecasts see agricultural and farming losses by year-end topping billion.
Lying on a grassy bank after a swim in a canal, a group of students told me they’d had enough.
“It’s been good, but we don’t need a whole month of this,” said 20-year-old Igor Alexeyev. “It would be better to have two weeks on, two weeks off. Or even just hot weather every other day.”
