ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- “Where is the water tanker?”
In the residents’ WhatsApp chat for a housing complex in the Medeu district of Almaty, “vodavoz” -- the Russian word for water tanker -- was everywhere.
Whole swathes of the mostly affluent district of the country’s former capital spent the past week without running water -- a development that Almaty’s city government attributed to “natural factors.”
More specifically, city authorities said that strong runoff from glaciers had made the Small and Big Almaty rivers so fast and muddy that the filtering station serving the local water supply could no longer process the dirt.
The situation, they said, would only correct itself once the heat wave -- temperatures were constantly around 35-40 degrees Celsius throughout the second half of July -- had abated.
On day three of the water shutoff, as residents of at least one housing complex staged a small protest, portable toilets arrived at the complexes.
Not everyone was sympathetic.
Back in the WhatsApp chat, some residents expressed contrition at comments under news posts about their situation to the effect of, “Let them see how the rest of us live.”
According to government data, nearly all of Kazakhstan’s urban residents (a slight majority of the total population) and just over half of all rural residents have running water taps inside their homes.
Journalist Mikhail Kozachkov, therefore, summed up the situation more accurately when he wrote on his Telegram channel that “residents of the upper sections of Almaty are living worse than ordinary Almaty residents on the very outskirts of the city. They have no water, nothing to flush away feces, and nothing to make porridge with.”
“We did not buy housing here to find out how places without water and other basic conditions live,” wrote one woman in the chat. “As rude as it sounds, people work themselves into the ground in order to have the opportunity not to come into contact with these inconveniences.”
To be sure, this was not the dream they were sold.
Residential complexes in the Medeu region are some of the most expensive in Almaty, with flats typically selling from over $1,500 per square meter to several times that.
For some of the older complexes, these are significant discounts on what the flats originally cost in dollar terms before successive financial crises shook Kazakhstan’s housing market more than a decade ago.
Invariably, new housing developments in the Medeu district are billed as “green” and “ecologically pure” answers to the noise and dirt of the city center.
One of the more upscale, which only recently sprang to life, is literally called La Verde -- Spanish for “the green.”
Apartments there that are bigger than 200 square meters begin at around $700,000.
But there is nothing green about having no water.
Water Tanker Politics
This year has already brought major water shortages to big Central Asian cities.
Parts of Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, and Kyrgyzstan’s capital of Bishkek endured water shutoffs at the beginning of the summer.
In Bishkek, where the problem was more protracted, authorities acknowledged that the water table had sunk lower than expected due to below-average precipitation in the first half of the year.
They promised to tap new sources of groundwater for a city where more than 1 million people live.
The ultimate source of water for most Central Asian cities is glacier-fed rivers, and most of those glaciers are shrinking.
A warming atmosphere, hot summers, and shortfalls of snow and rain are all factors beyond the control of local governments.
But water can always be managed better, and in Central Asia it often seems to be managed badly, with decaying infrastructure ignored from decade to decade.
Prior to the return of a regular supply of water last weekend, Medeu residents showered complaints on the private management of the housing complexes -- where utility bills are typically higher than in the city center -- and public officials.
Kozachkov, the journalist, wrote in his post that companies dumping construction waste upstream were the real cause of the crisis.
Famous Kazakh rapper Skriptonite, a Medeu resident, was also inclined not to believe the “muddy waters” explanation -- which Almaty’s City Hall reinforced with a helicopter press tour for selected journalists -- and shared his pessimism with his 2 million followers on Instagram.
In the fog of anger, the “vodavoz” driver emerged as both a savior and a villain for Medeu, depending on whether the vodavoz had arrived or not, and on the order in which he made his rounds.
In one of the complexes, there was a debate about where the vodavoz should stand.
Should he park next to the fifth building, which was more elevated than the rest, to ensure nobody had to carry pails of water up a steep hill? Or next to the playground, which was central for all residents?
He eventually stopped at both and helped queuing residents to fill up empty, 6-liter water bottles and buckets.
“People think I am hanging around,” said Daulet, the vodavoz driver.
“They are ringing me asking when I’ll be here. They can’t understand that I am stuck in traffic on Al-Farabi and literally cannot move,” he told RFE/RL as he took a rest in the midday heat.
That is yet another stick with which to beat Almaty’s mayor, Yerbolat Dosaev.
Medeu’s water shutoff dovetailed awkwardly with a city transport collapse, after Dosaev green-lighted major renovation works on Al-Farabi and another major road, Abay, at the same time.
That decision has slowed the journey from the suburbs to the city center and funneled more traffic through the byroads, where several of the affected complexes are located.
Separately, government critics point out that authorities habitually use road repairs as an opportunity to launder money.
Dosaev has pleaded for patience, insisting that the roadwork is vital for Al-Farabi and Abay to survive the winter.
Al-Farabi has not seen serious renovation since 2012, he said.
The mayor has so far ignored a petition with tens of thousands of signatures calling for his resignation, maintaining that many of the signatories are probably bots.
Angering The 'Apolitical' Middle Class
The midnight line waiting for the vodavoz was a more relaxed place to be.
The temperatures had cooled and residents shared jokes as they filled up using mobile-phone flashlights, as teenagers broke the curfew to do water runs on their electric scooters.
Thanks to the recent extension of the pedestrianized section along the Big Almaty River, it is now possible to take an electric scooter or a bicycle all the way down from this part of Medeu into central Almaty, encountering few cars in the process.
Back in Soviet times, this part of Medeu hosted a large sovkhoz (state farm) that grew apples and other fruits.
Just a few years ago, residents of older houses in the district could still occasionally be seen grazing their goats in what is now a sprawling recreational zone.
The extension of the pedestrian path has made Medeu an even more attractive place to live, with the La Verde development boasting walk-on access to the river.
If in the past this section of Almaty enjoyed a cooler microclimate than the rest of the city -- and significantly less smog in the winter -- these boundaries are increasingly blurring with the emergence of yet more housing projects.
Normal water service has now been restored in Medeu, and the anti-sanitary funk has dissipated.
But the memories of their week without water -- of nighttime visits to the portable cubicles with mosquitos circling inside and neighborhood dogs barking at the door -- will likely linger with these residents for some time.
And this is significant insofar as the people in these apartment complexes are the type who have done well for themselves in modern Kazakhstan, often while steering clear of politics.
Yet during the water shutoff, “an amorphous and apolitical public suddenly felt that they could not do without protesting” and mobilized, wrote Marat Asipov, editor in chief of the Ratel.kz website and another Medeu resident.
And if the situation generated ironic comparisons between middle-class Kazakhs and rural poor, it has also reinforced the division between that same middle class and the super wealthy ruling elite, Asipov argued.
“[Mayor] Dosaev, with his money, can easily move to any other country. He could, for instance, become a neighbor of another odious mayor of Almaty, Viktor Khrapunov, who now lives in Geneva,” Asipov wrote. “It is us who will have to live here.”
