Images from Western Siberia 2: Tets-5

Tets-5

It was the kind of blindingly bright day typical of Novosibirsk's winters. As I walked out of the university, bleary-eyed and zipped into a loon-down jacket, I noticed a particularly fine cloud developing on the horizon. I did not pause as I should have as that word developing crossed my mind. The wind was not blowing, but the cloud accumulated nonetheless.

Rounding the corner towards the marshrutka stop, eyes still glued to the cloud, the long perspective of Vybornaya street came into view. The leftmost side of this visage, that on the side of the street leading to the city center, was decorated by the pine trunks of Iniushenskii bor ("In-you-shin-ski" forest), one of the only forests within the city limits. The rightmost was crowded by ten-floor apartment buildings, a small shopping center (Торговый центр), and, finally, the cloud that caught my eye. Tracing the outline of the cloud from its heights to the horizon, I made a shocking discovery.

The cloud generator. Photo credit: Erin McConnell

I was yet to move to Vybornaya street and, apparently, still very unfamiliar with the major features of the area, which represented the outer limit of the October district. These Simpsons-style smokestacks (Hyperboloid cooling towers) belch steam produced by the coal-fired plant located at the end of Vybornaya street known as Tets-5 (Thermal Power Plant Number 5). When I later moved into a tenth-floor apartment on Vybornaya street, Tets-5 came to dominate the view from the left side of my window, putting the Iniushenskii forest on the other side in serious industrial relief.

While other Siberian cities rely more heavily on hydroelectric power, Novosibirsk depends on coal-fired plants like Tets-5 to keep the waves of electric heat radiating from the famous Soviet batarei (radiators). They dry heat emanating from the radiators for nine months of the year has been ironically dubbed the "Siberian summer" by locals. To be clear, the company running these plants--The Siberian Generating Company (SibGenCo)--wants locals to be proud of these massive plants keeping the heat on. An advertisement appeared in my apartment building's elevator one day inviting residents of Vybornaya street to come take a tour of the facility, the largest modular thermal-energy center in Siberia, providing energy to 35% (800,000) of Novosibirsk's residents. These impressive numbers come at a cost, however.

Almost immediately after I returned to America in July, news articles about Tets-5 appeared in the BBC, Cosmopolitan, and BuzzFeed. Instead of touting the impressive energy output of the plant, these articles focused on what was done with the waste product. Waste from the burning coal was trucked to a lake directly behind the plant and dumped, a process which turned the lake a bright turquoise color. The tropical color of the lake attracted locals seeking tropical Instagram pictures without the tropical vacation and soon the area received an appropriate name, the "Novosibirsk Maldives."

Though I never visited Novosibirsk's Maldives, I can attest to the magnetic force of an exotic Instagram backdrop, especially for Siberians, many of whom cannot afford a far-flung international vacation. Many of the articles written about Siberians flocking to the lake are written with the assumption that those visiting it were not aware that it was a toxic dump. While this may have been true for some, the lake's proximity to the enormous coal plant would have made that fact obvious for locals. It is doubtful that any of those visiting weren't aware of the fact that it was the waste from the plant that was turning the lake blue. And so this story tells a different story about Siberians, not a tale of reckless abandon, but of dedication and persistence in the pursuit of Instagram glory.