Brown Water in Kem, Dry Taps in Ropsha

In one photograph, the water is the colour of tea. In another, a dark brown puddle lies beside a delivery tanker.

Residents of Kem, in Russia’s Republic of Karelia, shared the photographs in a local online community. The regional news outlet Petrozavodsk Govorit reported their complaints on Sunday, 25 October. People described heavily discoloured water arriving by tanker, irregular deliveries and cancelled visits without advance warning.

One resident said household filters struggled to cope. Another described people collecting large quantities of water from a public standpipe. Their accounts raise two immediate concerns for households relying on deliveries: the quality of the water and whether the next tanker will arrive.

The photographs and complaints document residents’ experiences. They provide no laboratory explanation for the discolouration.

Further south, in Ropsha in the Leningrad region, the consequences of a water outage have reached kitchens, bathrooms and workplaces.

Anna, a mother of three, told the local newspaper Fontanka on Saturday that flushing the toilet meant carrying buckets of water and filling the cistern by hand. She washed dishes in basins. Washing clothes and keeping herself and her children clean had become daily problems.

“Everyday life has become a nightmare,” she told the newspaper.

The supply was cut at 4.45pm local time on Thursday, 22 October, following a fault at a pumping station. The outage affected 123 residential buildings and several public facilities. By Sunday, residents were facing their fourth day of disruption.

Each revised restoration time extended the wait.

The water company initially expected supplies to return around lunchtime on Saturday. That estimate moved to Sunday evening. On Sunday, Lenoblvodokanal told the regional newspaper 47news that it now expected water to return around lunchtime on Monday, 26 October.

The company said it was awaiting laboratory results to establish that the water was safe. Work included sampling, testing and flushing a clean-water storage reservoir. The latest estimate depended on those results.

Lenoblvodokanal said water deliveries had been arranged during the outage.

At the local school, the autumn holiday began a day early. Parents told 47news that the nursery would also remain closed on Monday.

For Anna, the closure had already meant missing work. Her youngest child is five. With the nursery shut, she told Fontanka, she had to stay at home.