Residents of Srednekolymsk in Yakutia again raised the issue of the town’s lack of a proper morgue during a public report by the regional government. As SakhaDay reported, locals say officials present annual progress reports, yet one of the most painful problems remains unresolved: the town still has no separate specialized facility for storing the bodies of the deceased.
According to local residents, after a person dies, the body may be temporarily placed in basement rooms of a medical facility until investigators or a forensic medical expert arrive. Interviewees told reporters that such spaces can at times be located next to areas where business owners store food products.
“If the forensic expert is supposed to fly in, we are immediately told to heat the stove and thaw the body. Then it may turn out that the plane never arrived,” a resident named Anna told SakhaDay.
After the issue drew public attention, Srednekolymsk officials said citizens’ complaints had been taken up for review. In a report by the Yakutia government dated February 20, authorities said they had registered concerns about the lack of a morgue, the availability of airline tickets, the absence of a garage for ambulances, and the condition of utility infrastructure. Residents, however, say they have heard such promises for years and that nothing changes.
Experts may be delayed for weeks
Local resident and journalist Zhanna Konstantinova described the situation to the outlet Veter. The Srednekolymsky district is one of the hardest-to-reach areas in Yakutia: there are no year-round roads between settlements, winter travel depends on seasonal ice roads, and in summer transport is often possible only by helicopter. If a person dies in one of the villages, the body is first taken to the district center, but autopsies are often delayed because there is no permanent forensic expert in town. A specialist must be called in from Yakutsk, roughly 2,000 kilometers away.
Konstantinova recalled that after a relative died, the family waited several days for the expert to arrive. During that time, the body was kept in a small old unheated building formally referred to as a morgue, though she says it is closer to a shed: inside there is an iron stove, there is no running water, and relatives have to bring water themselves. Because of weather conditions, flights were repeatedly canceled, and the room was alternately heated with a heat gun and then left to freeze again in temperatures of minus 35 to 40 degrees Celsius.
She said that in villages, bodies are often kept in basements or ice-cellar freezer spaces rented by business owners to store meat and other products. In her view, such conditions can affect the quality of forensic examinations and the determination of the cause of death. Konstantinova also recounted that a former deputy chief doctor at the district hospital had described a case in which the room was heated with heat guns in winter and the body was accidentally charred, making an examination impossible.
An attempt to build a morgue failed
In 2022–2023, Konstantinova and her husband proposed a public-private partnership project to the Yakutia Health Ministry: to build a small modular morgue and then lease it to the hospital with a buyout option. The family hoped to secure a subsidy of about 1 million rubles through the My Business support center, but the project never moved forward. First, the issue of a land plot could not be resolved, and later, according to Konstantinova, the ministry said it would handle construction on its own. Residents were later told that more than 15–17 million rubles might be allocated for a morgue and a garage, but the funding never materialized.
Local resident Anatoly Tyrylgin told Veter that he has been sending complaints to various authorities since 2020. According to the outlet, it has copies of letters sent to Russia’s Health Ministry in August 2023, to prosecutors in October 2024, and to the Russian government in November 2024. In one appeal to Yakutia head Aysen Nikolayev dated February 27, 2024, Tyrylgin complained not only about the lack of a morgue, but also about the shortage of functioning ambulances and the absence of a garage at the district hospital.
Responses from the regional Health Ministry, as reported, listed other measures instead: modular outpatient clinics built in three villages, repairs to the outpatient clinic in Nalimsk in 2018, and the allocation of one ambulance. At the same time, the ministry said the healthcare modernization program did not provide for the construction of garages. Whether anything will be done about the morgue remains unclear: Veter said it sent a request to the regional Health Ministry. Konstantinova says the district hospital lacks money even for medicines, but for families of the dead, the lack of a morgue becomes yet another severe ordeal.