Post-Soviet Apocalypse--July 4-5

July 4--Baku

Nothing to report. Happy holidays to all.

July 5--Sumqayit

My Lonely Planet guide mentions Sumqayit as: "a coastal village made dystopian industrialist nightmare by the placing of much of the Soviet chemical industry here after WWII." This is something not to be missed.

I hire a taxi in Baku to take me out there. We drive into Sumqayit, and I see flowers, parks, and swept streets. How do you tell your driver that you want to see industrial catastrophe and toxic waste? I try drawing a picture. That doesn't work. He spots a nicely dressed man getting into a 4 x 4 and pulls over and asks him in Russian if he knows any English. He does! We're in business!

"Sir, I would like to visit Sumqayit's former Soviet industrial complex."
"Oh, yes. There is an aluminum factory."
"Yeah! And the caustic soda one?"
"There are many, many. Please to follow me."

We follow this very nice man to the north of town, and there it is--stretching for miles across flat barren land--an absolutely horrific, class 1, environmental disaster. What you can't see from the road, but I caught a bit of it while flying in the other day, is the wet, chemical slicks. Lonely Planet also mentions the "Baby Cemetery," which is somewhere out here (we couldn't find it) that is filled with the tiny victims of this nightmare. Many graves are unmarked, while some have portraits of wretchedly deformed and retarded children. Sumqayit holds the record in the region for infant mortality.

My driver catches on to what I'm after, and I think he hopes the word gets out about this place. He stops and points out some particularly nasty sights that make great photo ops.

By the way, you can click on any of these images to enlarge them and use them as possible screen savers.

I wonder if movie location scouts have been out here yet. It's like something out of Mad Max.

Most of the area looks abandoned, but some stuff is still spewing.

The workers' paradise