People created a poisonous dump right inside the cave, and now the water in the Sochi district may be poisoned.

I received a letter from readers asking for help in influencing a serious environmental problem. Speleologists from the Sochi Geographical Society, during an expedition to the Berezhny Cave (in the area of the village of Yermolovka), discovered an UNDERGROUND dump with extremely hazardous waste. This is a hidden catastrophe created by people.

When the speleologists descended into the cave, it turned out that instead of pristine karst formations there were piles of household trash, chemicals, and decaying animal bodies. According to preliminary estimates, the volume of the dump is about 200 m³. One can estimate that this equals roughly 20 fully loaded dump trucks, but removing this waste from the cave is hardly feasible—it’s a very difficult task.

People dumped all kinds of waste there—from bags of household garbage to canisters with oils and petroleum products, shards of glass, and various pollutants.

But, as readers wrote to me in their letter, everything is complicated by the fact that beneath these layers of waste the speleologists found a LARGE ANIMAL BURIAL GROUND: a huge number of skulls and bones of cows, dogs, and other animals.

Soil and water tests from the cave revealed the banned insecticide DDT and its toxic metabolite. These substances do not break down in nature and can accumulate in ecosystems, creating long-term problems.

Extremely dangerous.

The Berezhny Cave is part of the Akhshtyr karst system—a network of underground passages and cavities up to 100 meters deep that is connected to surface waters. Water from the contaminated cave, through a network of karst conduits, flows into local rivers, springs, and water sources, covering the area from the Psou River (the border with Abkhazia) to the Khosta district in Sochi. In other words, contamination is realistically affecting not only mountain and coastal rivers, but also drinking water intakes and resort zones.

Not only does the dump contain a huge amount of hazardous substances, it also contains an insecticide capable of retaining its toxicity for decades. Once in the water, it accumulates further in the tissues of animals and humans, harming health. If urgent measures are not taken, this dump in the cave may become a real environmental disaster, and people drinking water in Sochi may not even realize they have “received as a gift” a whole bouquet of severe chronic diseases. Dying from cancer in a decade, no one will remember the “sip of life-giving water” that triggered the chronic illness.

As part of our projects, we are launching a public initiative demanding that the regional authorities carry out work to eliminate the garbage dump in the cave. It is also necessary to sanitize the site and assess the damage already caused to local ecosystems and people. In addition, an inspection should be carried out to find those who created this dump! Bring them to justice to the fullest extent of the law.

The public initiative will be launched within the day. Our team will prepare requests to government bodies, and we will monitor the resolution of this problem!

I ask all Allies to disseminate this material as widely as possible, to draw public attention and help shed light on the problem.

© PAVEL PASHKOV