How do you tell if your city is suffering from a severe case of pollution? You can tell how badly your city is polluted with pollution when you have to paint a snow slide white because it is covered by soot and ash. Authorities in Mysky, a town in the Siberian region of Kemerovo, are facing the music after they covered a snow slide for children in white paint in order to reduce the visibility of coal dust on it from the nearby quarries.
It started happening after a local resident posted a video on YouTube. Russian media was all over the news and began reporting about the snow painting situation that was being faced by residents of Mysky a few days ago. The YouTube video posted by the local resident, Svetlana Zelenina, has gone viral and shows how simply making contact with the snow slide left her hands covered in a sticky white material. According to Zelenina, this sticky white substance looks like water-based paint. She also goes on to tell that the parents whose offspring had used the slide say that their children look like ‘Indians wearing war paint.’ While we know that the children must have had fun with this, we can only imagine the trouble that the parents had to go through!
Zelenina says, ‘You can see the stains… It even sticks,’ in the video and shows the viscous substance on her fingertips to the viewers. So, what exactly happened? It turns out that the city workers tasked with building a snow slide as a winter attraction for the kids. However, these workers were not able to find clean snow anywhere in the town. Their course of action was to paint the dirty snow to cover up the soot and ash from the nearby coal plants and quarries that was covering it.
Once the news of this incident started to spread, the mayor of Mysky had to apologize to the locals while stating that the employees of the Office of the Organization of City Improvement must avoid such ‘creative’ solutions. Mayor Dmitry Ivanov said, ‘I apologize to the townspeople whose New Year’s mood was spoiled by this.’
