Mykolaiv lacks two thousand shelters for the entire population

Mykolaiv lacks two thousand shelters to protect the entire population of the city.

This was reported by Roman Vozniak, head of the city's emergency management department, in a commentary to NikVesti.

According to him, the city authorities are planning to gradually increase the number of available shelters if funding is available.

«We lack two thousand shelters in the city to cover the entire population. This is a general statistic that is recorded and there are not enough of them. Unfortunately, this information is available. «There is a strategy for the development of the Civil Protection Facilities Fund», which has been approved by the government until 2034. We hope that we will be provided with funding and will be able to increase the number of shelters registered in a particular part of the city,» commented Roman Vozniak.

Earlier it was reported that during the shelling, Mykolaiv residents cannot get into departmental shelters outside of working hours. The editors of NikVesti were contacted by city residents who were unable to get into the shelter at 173 Tsentralnyi Avenue during the alarm. All other shelters nearby also belong to institutions or enterprises that are on the balance sheet of municipal or private institutions and accept people only during working hours. The Mykolaiv City Hall promises to discuss the issue of shelter availability at a meeting of the executive committee.

The situation with shelters in Mykolaiv

Only 7% of the shelters in Mykolaiv are open. At the same time, there is a problem with the accessibility of the shelters — there is no ramp or gentle slope. In April 2024, residents of Mykolaiv were unable to get to the shelter on the territory of the children's town «Kazka» during an air raid alert because it was closed. The administration of the children's town conducted an internal investigation into this fact.

This is not the first time that shelters in Mykolaiv have been closed during an air raid alert. Shelters in the Matviivka neighbourhood, in the city' s central district and in the «Yunist» park were also closed during the 17 March strikes on Mykolaiv. After these incidents, Mykolaiv Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych urged residents to call the police if a shelter or a storage facility is locked during an air raid.

Overall, Mykolaiv was on the list of regions with the worst condition of shelters. After inspecting the condition of shelters across Ukraine, the NSDC found the work on the readiness of shelters for use in a number of regions and cities, including Mykolaiv, to be unsatisfactory. The mayor then dismissed the head of the Department for Emergency Situations and Civil Protection, Oleksandr Herasymenia. The first deputy mayor, Vitalii Lukov, was reprimanded.

The head of the Mykolaiv Regional Civil Defense Administration, Vitalii Kim, said that 69% of the region's abandoned shelters are in Mykolaiv. At the same time, almost half of the city's residents (47%) rated the condition of the city's bomb shelters as terrible or poor.

Back in May 2023, more than 70 million hryvnias was allocated from the Mykolaiv budget to repair and equip the shelters. However, it turned out that the city budget would not receive any of the 102 million hryvnias that the state had allocated to repair shelters in schools and kindergartens in the region. At the end of August 2023, the head of the Regional Military Administration, Vitalii Kim, said he was dissatisfied with the shelters in the region's schools.

The head of the education department of the Mykolaiv City Council, Hanna Lychko, said that shelters were being repaired in 21 schools in the city, and another 9 were at the planning stage. At the same time, the city council stated that by the end of 2023, the Department of Housing and Communal Services plans to repair 18 simple shelters.

In October 2023, NikVesti reported that the Architecture Department of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration had concluded 27 direct contracts within a month for the development of design estimates and major repairs of public sector institutions with a firm from «Architectural Bureau — Wave 89», which has existed for less than six months and is owned by a member of the regional public council for recovery. Later, the Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration explained that direct contracts for the design of shelters with this firm saved the budget.

In August 2024, the government allocated about 5 billion hryvnias from the budget for shelters in schools in eight regions, including Mykolaiv region.

Also read the article NikVesti «Either two walls or go outside». Why haven't the authorities in Pivdennoukrainsk built a single shelter for the community in more than two years of war?»

It should be noted that Mykolaiv region was among the five regions that showed the best performance in 2024 in terms of building and making shelters ready.