After seeing the new Emergencies Ministry center, Russian President Vladimir Putin (center) can rest assured that crises will be handled reliably after he leaves office.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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The President at the Emergency Center
Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the new Ministry of Civil Defense and Emergency Situations national management center yesterday for its launching. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov had some unexpected ideas about recouping the cost of the facility as he toured it, which is included in his onsite report.
The national crisis management center, on which about 2 billion rubles of the people's money was spent in the course of less than a year for construction (financed from the federal target programs fund), is located on Kutuzovsky Prospect and Aminyevsky Highway, among the disgraceful five- and nine-story residential buildings, from which it is not very distinguishable, if you don't look too hard. But it's worth taking a good look at.
It's worth going into as well. An Emergencies Ministry employee who rode up to the seventh floor in the elevator with us, admitted that she had never seen anything like it, not even in American films. She was thinking, of course, of the type of film where the special agents are barely able to drag the hero loner out of the tequila bar in Texas on the border with Mexico and then he saves the world from terrorists at a leisurely pace, phoning in to a center like this from time to time to report to the military and political leadership of the country, who follow his actions, questionable as they are from a legal point of view, with bated breath. The lightening is dim there, equipment glows on tables, there are huge screens on the walls and employees sit in front of 50-inch touch screens, moving across kilometers of land and space with their fingers as they zoom in on the sewer system in the Ust-Labinsk district of Krasnodar Territory – there was a cave-in there, you see.
Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoigu came in, looked around, and was not satisfied. But he was unable to say a word to anyone before the reporters also acted as of they were in a Hollywood film and Shoigu spent a painful quarter hour answering questions.
“From this center, we can not only manage emergency recovery,” he said, “but the crop yield as well. For example, we can judge whether or not logging is legal.”
“How do you do that?” he was asked.
“We scan the area,” he answered with a shrug. No one asked anything further about it.
“So you have a national tracking system set up here,” I said. “We were in the new military intelligence building not long ago and they didn't have one there. Everything was simpler somehow.”
Someone nearby clicked his tongue, watching someone else at a touch screen spin the Earth with his fingers and alight upon the White House in North America.
“Tell me,” I asked computer operator Petrov. “This map you are so proud of, on which you can see a car's license plate – isn't it downloaded from Google with weekly updates? It looks the same.”
“Yes, it does,” agreed Petrov. “But we have a different approach. We create a three-dimensional space. There are few Google maps here. And hazardous objects, such as oil storage facilities, are shown in more detail on our maps than anywhere else.
He showed me a LUKOIL facility with all of its internal communications, which looked rather flimsy from there. When asked to show something else, the computer operator politely but firmly refused. It was not because nothing else was ready yet, as he said without looking at me, but simply because that was enough already.
A foreign journalist asked Shoigu if, had such a system existed in 2001, would he have been able to prevent the tragedy on the Kursk submarine. He dismissed the question brusquely.
“Can it predict terrorist acts?” she asked, sounding deflated.
“Terrorist acts? They are hard to predict. But we can simulate them,” Shoigu answered, sounding as if he were trying to be nice.
“Are you proud of it?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” he answered with painful seriousness.
They showed Putin the center and suggested a demonstration of how they would handle an oil spill in the Gulf of Finland or Caspian Sea, like the one that happened last week when there was an accident on a small tanker.
If the system had been functioning then, it would have been handled well, I understood. Pictures flashed across screens with the speed of a hurricane showing the overturned tanker (if it were a hurricane) or the fire spreading through it (if it were a fire). Orders were barked from all directions. There were detailed reports on the screens from the heads of emergency services ( and even special services). I watched enthralled, and I even regretted a little that the emergency was going to end.
The president was also transfixed. He watched the way one does standing on a glacier looking for wandering travelers as other glaciers collapse around them. They showed him on one magic touch screen how forest-covered mountains can be deforested and the mountain stripped bare. Putin watched with such intensity that I thought he was having thought of something unpleasant.
But that particular function could only make a commander of the special forces in the mountains of Chechnya happy.
Shoigu couldn't resist trying to expand the permissible viewing area around Veliky Ustyug with a few flicks of his fingers. But Veliky Ustyug wouldn't budge. The minister tried again, and failed again. Veliky Ustyug was unused to such treatment and not about to give in to it. The minister gave up.
On another screen, the president was being shown, with the aid of a tremendous number of pointers, how they would handle a tidal wave, in the Northwestern Federal District, I think it was.
I saw that the president was distracted by a news broadcast concerning Senate debates in the United States. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were questioning a general about Iraq and Putin's eyes involuntarily traveled to the lower right corner of the screen, where it was displayed. In Shoigu's new office on the tenth floor of the building (“The Leader's Office” it said on the door), the president listened to a report by the minister on the money and labor poured into the construction of the complex and its rapid recoupment period. No one, after seeing all that imposing equipment could possibly think that the eternal Minister Shoigu could be replaced in the next reorganization of the government.
He was right to get the center up and running as fast as possible. It has already paid for itself.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 10, 2008
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