Bedridden veteran freezing in Kyiv high-rise building without heating: electricity provided for hour per floor
After the massive shelling by the aggressor state of russia on January 9, complaints about the cold and the availability of electricity for only an hour a day began to appear in the chat room of a house in the Kharkivskyi Masyv neighbourhood of Kyiv. On the morning of January 17, a temperature of -5.8°C was recorded in one of the apartments. The condominium manually distributes electricity for an hour or two per floor per day. Among the residents is a lonely veteran in a wheelchair.
It was reported by hromadske.
It is about a new house at 127 and 127a Kamianska Street in the Kharkivskyi Masyv neighbourhood, where everything is "powered by electricity". The allocated hours of light are manually distributed by the representatives of the condominium - each floor gets one and a half to two hours of light per day.
The thermometers in the apartments have dropped from +10°C to +2°C - in an hour or two with the light on, the apartments simply do not have time to heat up when it is a big minus outside. Residents sent complaints to various institutions: "Our life has become a choice: heat or food. Basic human needs are not available to us."
In the house's chat room, residents both quarreled and gave advice on how to keep warm, insulate windows, posted photos of buckets of water on the grill with candles burning under them, and considered buying a generator.
"Please, turn on the seventh floor, I'm in the apartment with a hat and mittens, my legs are numb."
"I spent more on the vet for my dog because of the cold than the rent for the apartment."
"Give me some light, I have a small child."
"I roll the dice every day: what to turn on - the boiler, heating or charging power banks."
And on Friday night, an apartment on the top 12th floor and part of the roof of the building completely burned down. There is no expert opinion on the cause of the fire yet, but there are versions that it was caused by low voltage, which is why electrical appliances cannot work. At the same time, firefighters have previously said that all fire safety rules were violated in the house.
After the fire was extinguished, water poured down the walls and froze - icicles formed in the entrance, and the stairs turned into a skating rink. Residents sprinkled salt on the ice and scraped it off into buckets.
DTEK says that the residents of the house should address this with the condominium, and meanwhile, the head of the institution took a sick leave and in response to messages, blacklists people.
The publication notes that people don't know how to draw attention to their house - they wrote all the complaints and appeals before the fire. And now they are ready to block the street to get help.
Among the residents of the house is 56-year-old combat veteran Valerii Antonovych, a lonely man who uses a wheelchair due to a broken spine. However, the building does not have a ramp, although he asked for one to be installed. It is indicated that he got out to the street on his knees.
The man is lying in bed with a pile of blankets, and there are three heaters next to him, which he uses to heat the small apartment when there is light. But it gets cold quickly.
"Because of this cold, his illnesses have become worse. He doesn't hope for anything anymore, he says he doesn't want to live in this darkness and cold anymore," said one of his neighbors.
Now a few people are staying in the house overnight. And on Saturday morning, after the fire, which burned down the roof and left the sky visible through the holes, the house chat messages said that it was already -5.8°C in one of the apartments, and the residents had nowhere to go.
As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, according to the Ministry of Energy, the most difficult situation with electricity supply in Ukraine is currently observed in Kyiv and the Kyiv Region. The previously published schedules of hourly power outages are not in effect there.
Meanwhile, The New York Times claims that the aggressor country russia has stepped up attacks on Kyiv's critical infrastructure to disrupt heating and power supply in the capital. These actions are intended to undermine the morale of the citizens and make Kyiv uninhabitable.