ANALYSIS: More water in the pipeline for Lviv (11/03/02)

ANALYSIS

More water in the pipeline for Lviv

by Vera Rich
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

The World Bank is to give Ukraine a $24 million loan to upgrade Lviv's water supply. For decades, residents of Lviv have been supplied with water for, at most, two periods (morning and evening) of two to three hours every day. The loan is earmarked for modernizing and replacing the equipment used in the city's water-supply and sewerage systems.

Certainly, such work is long overdue. Ten years ago it was estimated that one-third of the city's water supply is lost due to leakages before it ever arrives at its destination. However, new pipes and pumps alone cannot solve all the city's water problems.

Lviv's water shortages are the result of a combination of geographical factors and the legacy of Soviet planning. The city stands on the main European watershed, which divides the rivers that eventually feed into the Baltic Sea from those flowing to the Black Sea. The area, therefore, is not abundant in water by nature.

Lviv, however, was supplied by deep artesian wells, giving the city an important strategic advantage in times of war, since an enemy would be unable to cut off its water supply. One of the first things the Soviets did once their possession of the city was confirmed was to destroy these wells. This was supposedly in the name of "progress" (wells were "reactionary" and "backward-looking" - pipelines were "progressive" and "socialist"), but almost certainly the planners were not unaware of the security implications: should the inhabitants of Lviv rise against Soviet rule, without their wells they would be unable to resist a siege.

The Soviets then set out to effect demographic reform. Just as in Poland, where the "socialist" city of Nowa Huta was built adjacent to "Catholic" and "reactionary" Krakow, Lviv was to be turned from a cultured university city, the focus of the newly outlawed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, into a hive of Soviet production. New industries were to be established and a new "proletarian" workforce imported. These directives seem to have given no thought to the question of where the water for the extra population and industrial activity was to be found. To compound the problem, the industrial development focused on aluminum processing, a notoriously water-greedy technology.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, the city authorities of Lviv swiftly turned their attention to the water problem. Various expert studies were made and published, but the complexity of the situation and the post-Soviet economy effectively blocked any swift solution. Drilling new artesian wells was ruled out - Soviet "water management" had drastically lowered the water table of the entire area. Pipe in water from elsewhere? Theoretically possible, but that would mean laying up to 100 kilometers of new pipelines from the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. When surveyors went out to inspect possible routes and sources, they encountered vehement protests - and in some instances threats - from farmers afraid of losing their own scanty supplies. Shut down water-greedy industry? Horrendous problems of unemployment would arise. Install new closed-cycle processing technologies, which recover and reuse their wastewater? Possible, but very expensive.

"What we really need," one city official said in 1992, "is to cut the population of the city by half!" But who would decide who was to be relocated and provide incentives for them to leave? And where could they go?

Ten years later, these questions remain largely unsolved. The World Bank loan will certainly go a long way toward resolving the purely financial side of the problem, but the root situation, a city too large for its readily available water supply, is not so easy to tackle.

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