MOSCOW, May 28 (RIA Novosti) -Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said that Moscow had suffered severe losses as a result of the May 25 power outage.
"We are now counting losses, and a special commission has been set up for the purpose," Luzhkov said, responding to journalists' questions. He declined to give an approximate estimate of the damage but said that the blackout had incurred losses in the housing sector, social sphere, trade and industrial production (tentatively, experts estimate the total damage caused by the outage at over $1 billion).
The Moscow Oil Refinery has been out of operation for the last few days because it is a challenging task to re-launch an oil-refining process, the Mayor said. In addition, Luzhkov pointed out that Moscow transport system had suffered a damaging impact of the power outage. "About 30,000 people were trapped in the Moscow subway alone (earlier, immediately after the blackout, the subway management said that some 20,000 people and 43 trains had been trapped)," the Mayor added.
Luzhkov said that for many years he had been persistently pointing to "one and the same thing" - the inefficient management of Russia's Unified Energy Systems, with a particular focus made on the UES management's failure to upgrade the worn out equipment of the country's energy systems (UES CEO Anatoly Chubais spent a few hours in the Moscow Prosecutor's Office on Thursday night, answering investigators' questions in the context of the criminal case launched by the prosecutors in connection with the power outage).
"The UES management is very bad and inefficient. The disastrous accident unfolded not only because of the fire at the Chagino transmission substation but also because of a substandard condition of the UES power traffic control," Luzhkov said. He expressed hope that the commission as well as the Prosecutor's Office would "draw the right conclusions" from the events of May 25.
