More than 100 tons of scrap metal were collected by male volunteers as part of a two-week expedition to the Tazovsky District of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Vladislav Firsov, a student of the Faculty of Physical Education of Tomsk State University, also joined the expedition as a volunteer.
- At the Oka station (tropospheric radio relay station in the Tazovsky district of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug), we finished the work. Despite being very tired, we were happy. We collected more than 100 tons of garbage, - said Vladislav Firsov, a member of the expedition, a student of the TSU Faculty of Physical Education, for whom this trip was the fourth expedition to the Arctic.
A team of 19 volunteers dismantled old buildings for two weeks, removed iron and barrels from under fuels and lubricants. The volunteer expedition was organized by the Green Arctic.
It should be noted that the Oka tropospheric radio relay station is part of the Sever tropospheric communication system, developed in the 1950s in the USSR. The system served to provide reliable long-range communications and increase the country's defense capability in the Arctic and other hard-to-reach regions. Currently, tropospheric communication lines have been replaced by satellite systems, but they played an important role in the development of telecommunications in the middle of the 20th century. The Oka station, like the other 50 stations of the system, was deactivated in the nineties and two thousandths. But historical pollution still exists.
The interregional public ecosociological organization "Green Arctic" was created in 2014 to attract volunteers to projects for cleaning the Arctic territories of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug from anthropogenic pollution. During this time, with the help of 400 volunteers from 12 countries, 500 hectares of the Arctic territory were inspected and about 2.8 thousand tons of scrap metal were collected by hand. The Bely and Vilkitsky islands were completely cleared.
Text by TASS
Photo and video by Vladislav Firsov
