Mayor of Odesa Oleksii Kostusiev responded with outrage on April 16 to the environmental prosecutor’s office’s institution of two criminal cases concerning large-scale pollution of the Black Sea with fecal sewage after 21,000 tons of untreated sewage had been dumped near famous Arkadia Beach. Commenting on the situation at the 18th session of the city council, Kostusiev fumed over the public and the prosecutor’s office taking note of the latest incident only. “There were 37 similar cases over the past two years which went totally unnoticed, but the last one has attracted the general attention,” the mayor said angrily. He assured, however, that “it was the last ever untreated sewage discharge to occur near Arkadia Beach,” because the reconstruction of the Southern Municipal Sewer Basin’s drainage system had already started.
Following this reassurance, Kostusiev asked councilors, most of them belonging to the Party of Regions’ faction, to grant the permission to allot land for a new development in the same sewage-hit Arkadia to allow for a five-star Arcadia City hotel to be constructed there. Over the opposition’s strong protests, the bill passed the council. The mayor added that the elite hotel would be rebuilt from the Luxor Club building, and “the city needs money,” which would come from the developer.
Meanwhile, the regional prosecutor’s office’s press service said on April 16 that the investigation had determined that dumping of the drainage pumping station’s untreated sewage at sea had caused environmental damage estimated at 53 million hryvnias, and Odesa Interdistrict Environmental Prosecutor’s Office had instituted criminal proceedings against the perpetrators, top managers of Infoksvodokanal’s Odesa branch, accusing them of committing offenses defined in the Article 243.2 (marine pollution) and Article 364.2 (abuse of power or office) of the Criminal Code. The prosecutor’s office explained further that the accused managers, if found guilty, stood to be imprisoned for up to three years.
By the way, the Infoksvodokanal branch’s director Oleksii Leonov has already issued a statement maintaining that the company had dumped untreated sewage into the sea “on orders of the city’s mayor and his deputies,” while the management, well aware that the company was lacking the official permission from the State Environmental Inspectorate to discharge fecal sewage, supported another option...
For his part, head of the State Environmental Inspectorate’s North Western Black Sea Branch Serhii Lykhachov remarked that large-scale pollution of the Black Sea before the holiday season had occurred during the sewage reservoir’s repairs and the new sewage pumping station’s commissioning. The Infoksvodokanal’s branch had no spare and emergency reservoirs available, and the only functioning reservoir was operating continuously. Thus, repairs on it caused an illegal dumping of more than 21,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage 250 meters from the sea shore, near Arkadia Beach. The dumping lasted for a whole night between April 5 and 6...
“We had warned the Infoksvodokanal’s branch’s management that dumping of untreated sewage into the sea is illegal,” Lykhachov said. “When reconstructing urban drainage systems, one must strictly comply with the environmental protection measures, as required by the decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 1145,” he said. He added that “the work was carried out under the auspices of Odesa city government.”
