On September 11, the world needed superheroes. It found them not in comic books, but in real life. The fourplex was badly damaged in a severe 1995 earthquake that leveled the nearby town of Neftegorsk, killing 2,000 people. Researchers rebuilt part of the structure, adding men's and women's bunkhouses and crafting a crude but functional kitchen out of scrap. The team queues up for showers in the generator shed, with each person getting a turn every couple of days.
Drinking water comes from a well beneath the kitchen table.
A one-hole outhouse suffices for a toilet. Reindeer herders occasionally stop at the camp to smoke cigarettes and exchange stories with the lighthouse keepers and their families, tying their animals to a hitching post. Only the dogs and the keepers' young children spend much time outside, seemingly oblivious to the dense thicket of mosquitoes that swarm unmercifully when the air is still. The encampment is in one of the remotest spots in Sakhalin, which itself is considered an exotic and infamous locale by most Russians. During czarist times, Sakhalin became a giant penal colony and it was used as a dumping ground for undesirables during the Russian purges of the 20th century.