“You can hide there for a very long time”: metallurgist scientist Irina Butorina - about the Mariupol Azovstal plant

Irina Butorina is a professor at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, a specialist in the field of ferrous metallurgy and environmental problems of metallurgical production.

Before moving to Russia, she lived and taught in Mariupol.

Her house was located one and a half kilometers from the Azovstal plant.

According to the specialist, she took her students to the enterprise more than once to acquaint them with metallurgical production.

In an interview with RT, Irina Butorina spoke about the history of Azovstal and its features.

- Azovstal is one of the many plants built by the Soviet authorities at the beginning of the formation of the USSR.

Does it have any special features?

- In the Soviet Union, everything was built according to uniform state standards.

The plants were designed by the central Moscow institute "Gipromez", and its local branches only duplicated and expanded the projects.

Therefore, Azovstal is not much different from all other enterprises of a similar nature in the metallurgical industry.

Azovstal, when it was laid down in 1929, was conceived as South Magnitogorsk.

In 1933, the first blast furnace was blown out.

At the beginning, the plant made just pig iron, and then an open-hearth shop appeared for the production of steel, rolling shops - rail and beam and large-section (for building profile rolling).

The railroad was supposed to produce rails for railways, primarily for Siberian highways, such as BAM.

Rails are what distinguished the Azovstal plant from other metallurgical plants.

Then, in the 1960s, the rolling mill 3600 was laid down. The project was carried out within the framework of cooperation between the Warsaw Pact countries and was borrowed from the Czech Republic.

The mill rolled thick sheet metal for the needs of mechanical engineering, primarily shipbuilding.

The consumers of Azovstal products were the entire Soviet Union and friendly countries.

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- When they talk about the Azovstal plant, they always mention the plant named after Ilyich.

Was it built before?

- At the place where Azovstal is now located, at the end of the 19th century, the Belgian company Nikopol and Providence wanted to build a plant.

There is still a legend in Mariupol that its representatives gave members of the State Duma a drink in St. Petersburg restaurants for a long time, seeking permission from them to build a plant on the site of today's Azovstal, but because of the wind rose that would have carried the plant's emissions to the city, the Duma rejected their request and offered to build a site outside the city.

In 1896, the construction of a metallurgical plant began, which, under the Soviet regime, was called "MMK named after Ilyich".

He specialized in the production of steel sheet.

During the years of the first five-year plans, the Soviet Union was in dire need of rolled steel, and in this regard, no one began to think about the wind rose.

And as a result, Azovstal became a source of severe environmental disaster for the city, as the prevailing easterly winds in the Sea of ​​\u200b\u200bAzov began to cover the city with factory emissions.

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- Now, when a special operation is being carried out at Azovstal, everyone is worried about the question of whether there are such tunnels in which one can hide?

- There should have been bomb shelters: all our enterprises and our houses, built in Stalin's times, have bomb shelters.

It's not a secret.

Previously, nothing was built without them.

They say that Azovstal has an underground tunnel that connects the plant with the Ilyich plant.

Enterprises stand far from each other, across the Kalmius River.

I think there are five kilometers between them, but everyone says that the tunnel exists.

But the fact that there is also an underground city under Azovstal, I cannot say.

Although there are definitely large underground spaces.

At all metallurgical plants, communications have always taken place underground.

There are huge gas ducts for the evacuation of large volumes of flue gases.

These are tunnels made of refractory bricks - like sewers in old cities.

- Are the conveyors that feed raw materials to the blast furnaces also sunk below zero?

- At different plants, everything is arranged differently, but at Azovstal they are definitely drowned.

I have taken students there many times.

Therefore, you can hide there for a very long time.

In the Brezhnev years, almost right next to Azovstal, they set up houses - five-story buildings and nine-story buildings.

All of them were built under the Soviet Union - housing was not built under Ukraine.

Now the houses are destroyed.

At night, militants get out of the plant through underground passages and set up ambushes.

During the day, the microdistrict is cleaned, and then everything repeats.

How do you follow the bandits?

There are ruins all over the place.

— During the Great Patriotic War, the plant was destroyed.

After the war it was restored.

How

- When the Germans came, the city was taken on the move.

They even seized the City Executive Committee, which at that time was sitting and thinking about how to save the city.

The Germans captured the leadership of Mariupol and shot them in the center of the city in the square, where they were buried in a mass grave.

"Azovstal" and Ilyich's plant went to the Nazis in working order.

But then the Mariupol underground blew up the water supply system of the enterprise and for a very long time the Germans were busy with its restoration.

But back, the Soviet troops of the Germans were already knocked out, but the Nazis managed to undermine the blast furnaces.

After the liberation, the plant was quickly restored, and it worked quite normally by the end of the 1940s.

But now, I think, it's not worth messing with the restoration of the plant.

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- Why?

Do you think that the restoration of the plant will be too costly?

- Back in the 1980s, environmentalists came to the conclusion that the plant should be demolished and a garden city should be made in its place - a continuous coastal resort area.

But then the question arose: how can an entire plant be demolished?

And now it has almost been demolished as a result of hostilities.

And since it happened so, then in the conditions of an overabundance of produced metal, the plant can be demolished completely painlessly.

If necessary, it is better to build a machine-building plant there.

This is exactly what is lacking in Russia.

I don't think it's worth worrying about Azovstal.

As a person who walked this "Azovstal" far and wide, I will say that, of course, it hurts to see how it collapses.

But I am sure that the restoration is unprofitable.

My opinion is not unique.

The head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, also said that we would restore Ilyich’s plant, but we should think about Azovstal because of environmental problems.

I don't think it will be restored.

And they will do it right.

It is necessary to either redesign the plant or simply remove it from the coast.

Won in Pittsburgh closed the ferrous metallurgy plant and forgot about its existence.

- And yet, what was the plant like at the time of the collapse of the USSR and what happened to its products?

— It was a full-cycle metallurgical plant, which included a sinter plant, a coking plant, a lime shop, a blast furnace, a converter shop, and a rolling shop: blooming, rail-and-section and large-section, as well as a 3600 mill. The company has its own thermal power plant.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Azovstal plant halved its design capacity.

It was designed for 6 million tons of steel, and after the collapse it began to produce 3 million tons, mainly in the form of billets: slabs and squares.

The production of finished products has practically ceased, except for small batches of rolled products, which the plant supplied to African and Asian countries.

Small batches of rails were also rolled, mainly for the repair of Ukrainian railways.

Now modern 100-meter rails are in demand, the production of which Russia has mastered, while Azovstal made 25-meter rails, and these products have ceased to be in demand.

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— You mentioned mill 3600. Is it some special mill?

Why such a name?

- The name is given by the size.

3600 is the roll width.

At that time in the USSR it was the only enterprise where thick sheets were rolled.

However, we have been living after the Soviet Union for 30 years, Russia has reconstructed its production facilities, Ukraine has not.

Mill 3600 was needed for the production of thick plates for the construction of ships and pipelines.

Ukraine stopped building anything at all, and Russia began to produce its own metal, so that no one needed Azovstal's products.

I can say quite definitely, as an ecologist, that the construction of a metallurgical industry on the shores of the Sea of ​​Azov was a crime.

Because the Sea of ​​Azov has healing properties.

They could treat bone tuberculosis, female infertility, and a host of other diseases.

And on its banks it would be possible to create a medical resort area for the whole world.

Nowhere else would there be such resorts!

However, such complex factories were pushed to the very seashore and turned Mariupol into a zone of ecological disaster - there is no other way to say it.

This is being told to you by a person who spent his life trying to prove it and find a way out of the situation.

- What are you doing now?

— I teach the ecology of metallurgical production at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.

In my free time I do writing.

I have already published six books, three of which are about the war: "Caucasian novel" - about the Chechen wars, the second book, "To Odessa for May" - about the tragic events of May 2014 and its continuation, "Blown up Donbass" - about the 2014-2015 war.

The plans include a book about the tragedy of Mariupol.