Epress.am News from Armenia
The broken sanitary sewer of Yerevan’s infamous Nubarashen prison has finally been repaired, a resident of the district told Epress.am on Monday. According to the speaker, although the repair works were completed on Friday, but the overpowering smell of sewage in the area has yet to die down.
“The sewerage has been repaired, but the sewage lake that formed there over the years is still there. They didn’t even fill it up with dirt,” a resident of a nearby apartment block said.
Murad Sargsyan, the press spokesperson for Veolia Jur, the company that carried out the repair works, told Epress.am that their workers repaired a broken sewer line and replaced a worn-out pipe: “A 110-120-meter pipe and 4 hatches were provided by the management of the prison; the workers and the equipment used were ours.”
When asked how much money the company has spent on the works, Muradyan replied: “It was a gesture of goodwill. The people asked us to help them, and we did.”
Recall, the residents of the apartment blocks near the Nubarashen prison have been protesting for years that the prison’s broken sewer was causing foul stench in the entire neighborhood and making it nearly impossible for the locals to breathe. Yerevan authorities, however, have thus far failed to properly address the issue and replace the worn-out pipes.
At a February 13 meeting of Yerevan’s Council of Elders, opposition Yerkir Tsirani members tried to bring the issue to the attention of mayor Taron Margaryan by “gifting” him with jarfulls of sewage. Members of the ruling Republican Party, however, quickly resorted to physical force to stop the oppositionists from approaching the mayor’s table and violently pushed them out from the room.
On the same day, dozens of protesters who had rallied outside the Yerevan City Hall to condemn the attack on Yerkir Tsirani members were subjected to excessive and disproportionate force by law enforcement officers.