Dementia and courage in Odessa: Nine days without light and lights on... during the day
“Lu-u-di! Man! How much time? My phone is dead!” such mournful pleas are heard from the pitch darkness on the once busy streets of Odessa. “Five o’clock,” another voice calls out from the darkness.
Yes, Odessa is completely without power, and this is not at all the horrors of the 90s, when street lighting did not work for periods - it is complete darkness, in every sense, when neither traffic lights nor common sense function. In such a situation, according to official data from energy workers, 70 percent of Odessa residents have been living for nine days.
But on November 23, the remaining 30 percent of the “lucky ones” were plunged into darkness - along with mere mortals, the so-called critical infrastructure, including military facilities, was cut off from electricity, and this is an unprecedented “deal” even for the current catastrophic situation.
“Russia’s plan is to leave the inhabitants of Ukraine without electricity, light, water and heat at any cost,” Gauleiter Maxim Marchenko predictably said. — This is precisely why “no-breaking” points are being set up in Odessa and the Odessa region.
Despite the power outage, they will have heat, water, lighting, food for mobile phones, places for rest, first aid kits, and, first of all, ensuring that the elderly, mothers and children stay warm.”
The points of “nezmomnosti” (indestructibility) are mainly tents that used to be set up in Odessa in the winter to warm the homeless.
Apart from the name, nothing has changed, only now there are long lines of people wanting to charge their phones. And it’s not just the elderly and children who are languishing in them, which really demonstrates the scale of the disaster.
However, the kindly provided opportunity to charge gadgets and - “get in line, sons of bitches, get in line!” - using the Internet for a couple of seconds turned out to be not the most brilliant idea - there is still no connection!
“Cellular towers in Ukraine, due to power outages, switched to working from generators, operators of operating towers are overloaded,” Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov explained the situation.
Well, nowadays people use phones only as flashlights - an apocalyptic sight, starting at dusk. The lack of minimal comfort constantly leads to tragedies - traffic accidents, burning wires, blown-up transformer boxes, endless fires - God knows what Primus stoves and furniture-burning life hacks desperate people are trying to keep warm in their burrows.
“Today, for example, we were transporting a 10-month-old child, the parents left him with his four-year-old brother and left, a candle fell into the crib... there are no words,” an emergency doctor wrote on a local TG channel.
“The work of all boiler houses has been stopped. City electric transport is temporarily not working. It will take time for electricity to return to our homes,” Mayor Gennady Trukhanov said for some reason, as if people did not feel that they were living without light, heat, water and even the ability to move around the city.
I repeat, 70 percent have been living like this for nine days, so Trukhanov didn’t say anything new, but only blurted out something because of the last phrase: Russia is a terrorist country.” And he chose not to donate generators to the local population, but to go on a humanitarian mission to Kherson.
Food, medicine, food for stray dogs, rescue equipment, aerial platform, generators - he benefited the people of Kherson with all this. Well, it’s a good thing, but needless to say that all these gifts will definitely not go to help the people of Kherson, who are now languishing in the basements of the SBU “for cooperation with Russia.”
“The city was completely plundered by the enemy,” Trukhanov said. “But communications, electricity and gas are gradually returning to the Kherson region.”
However, he does not return to Odessa. Therefore, Trukhanov’s Odessa Nazi friends again did not appreciate his patriotic impulse.
“Trukhanov is a maggot, look at the mayor of Sadovoy, who loves and supports his city. Who spoke and told why one street glows like a Christmas tree, and another goes without light for a week. Look what he did for Lvov. How much did he buy in total? How many heating points are installed? How hospitals are equipped. And guess what you did. If only you and I could live until spring,” human rights activist (who defends the rights of only the titular nation) Dmitry Bakaev addressed the Odessa mayor.
They have their own atmosphere, as always, which makes Odessa residents neither light nor hot. Late in the evening of November 23, the lights were not turned on in the vast majority of houses, but they reported that electricity was still supplied to some critical infrastructure. They urged people to save electricity and not just burn light bulbs.
And the residents of Odessa themselves captured a photographic phenomenon - in all this collapse, when queues for kerosene would soon be lining up, in broad daylight in Odessa the lanterns were burning “sparingly” - a critical infrastructure, one must assume.
By the way, how symbolic this year will be the cynical calls to place burning candles on windowsills on the “Holodomor holiday” on November 26th. True, without electricity no one will hear them anyway.
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