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Electrocutions spark safety campaign |
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Poverty kills in unexpected ways in Moldova. It is the root cause of an appallingly high rate of electrocutions associated with power lines and electrical substations – 100 times the UK level. As an investor in the country’s electricity sector, the EBRD has joined the Moldovan government and the Canadian International Development Agency in a public awareness campaign to promote electrical safety through schools. Pavel Perciuleac, an electrical inspector in the village of Ciopleni outside Moldova’s capital city of Chisinau, recalls the latest electrocution in his district as though it happened to his own children. After a bumpy drive on the rutted pathways of a village in Europe’s poorest country, he opens the gate into a broken-down, ex-collective farm. Mr Perciuleac guides visitors carefully up a rickety metal staircase loosely hanging from a double-storey transformer building. There are no doors on the openings into the building. “Katerina is eight, Mihael is seven and Vera is six and they were playing here with their cousin, also six,” he remembers, charting their movement around the building which the children, with no where else to go, had treated as a playground. “Eventually the cousin, the youngest, went upstairs and got too close to a live electrical unit. He didn’t touch it but the power was so strong, it formed an electric arc through him, very badly wounding his shoulder where it went into his body, then exiting from under his knee. Luckily, the force threw him away from the transformer. Somehow, he survived. The other children helped him down the ladder – I don’t know how -- and got him home. The next day he was running around the hospital, playing. Nobody cared “The power was supposed to have been turned off in that building and I had asked the mayor to get someone in here to weld up the doors on the transformers,” says Mr Perciuleac grimly. “But it didn’t happen. Nobody cared.” Poverty begets electrocution in Moldova, particularly in the rural areas where villagers get by on half the national income of $100/month, if they’re lucky enough to have cash income. “People expose themselves to danger by trying to steal electricity through illegal hook-ups to power lines or stealing copper and aluminium wire, transmission lines, even doors off transformers to sell to scrap metal dealers,” says Silvia Radu, corporate vice-president of the privately-owned power utility Union Fenosa to which the EBRD has loaned €25 million. In the past 30 years, before partial privatisation of the electrical distribution network, there was no real investment made in maintaining electrical facilities. So it’s all too easy for accidents to happen: some power lines are not yet insulated and fall down in bad weather; transformers are held together with coat-hanger wire, are not fenced in (partly because fences get stolen) and are falling apart. “Often it’s kids doing the stealing, sometimes because their parents tell them to,” says Ms Radu, shaking her head in dismay. Stories abound of young copper wire thieves injured or killed for coils of metal worth $2-$3 – such is the desperation for cash. Building a legacy Union Fenosa focuses its maintenance and upgrading programme on those areas where accidents happen most often. But when it came to educating the public to keep away from electrical facilities, Ms Radu said the government had to play its part. “We have the EBRD and the Canadian government to thank for bringing all of us together – government, utilities, schools and the media – to address this problem,” says Ms Radu. The overall safety campaign emerged from the Moldovan Working Group on Electrical Safety. The group was formed under EBRD’s aegis in 2003 to bring together all relevant Moldovan ministries and agencies and the public and private electricity distribution companies. “The working group is the real legacy of this project,” says its first chair, EBRD electricity expert Lutz Blank. “While EBRD’s role in the project has ended, the working group is keeping the safety campaign alive and is already planning its 2006 electricity safety week.” An Electrical Safety Awareness Week focused on schoolchildren kicked off in November with a wildly successful poster contest. A teacher training programme and colourful, easy-to-understand safety posters were developed by consultants from Manitoba Hydro International funded by the Canadian government via EBRD. The campaign reaches kids through their teachers, and parents through their kids: children accounted for 20 out of 47 accidents in the Moldovan power sector in 2004, according to government statistics, and 8 of 33 deaths. Training the trainers “The project only directly trained teachers from 60 schools, but over 314 schools sent in entries for the safety poster contest,” said Larisa Manastirli, an EBRD banker in Moldova who worked with the consultants. “That’s half the schools in the country which means the first batch of teachers went beyond their own schools to tell others about it. We ended up with 2500 poster entries, a fantastic result.” “This has been such an impressive and heart-warming start to the public awareness campaign,” said David McGregor, Canada's trade commissioner covering Moldova, based in Romania. He visited the various sites and events in Moldova to represent Canada, which provided €265,000 in funding for the safety project, at the school poster award ceremony at a Chisinau school. “We hope this will become a regular event in Moldova,” he added. Written by EBRD Senior Writer Kate Dunn.
Contact: 9 December 2005 |
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