Of course they don't say why they died. Of course, they died because they worked there their whole life. There is no conclusive evidence of why, but the statistics speak for themselves. The 120,000 people who live in this bleak city and who work at Khimprom are sicker than their fellow Russians, up to 10 times as sick. Their children, especially those under 1 year old, suffer maladies, some fatal, at a greater rate than the national average.
Pregnant mothers have more complications during childbirth.
And so on. But it is more than health that contributes to a sense of unease and uncertainty here, in part because the future includes complying with the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international treaty that bans the use, production and storage of chemical weapons, and which demands that chemical weapons production facilities, like Khimprom, be demolished. All three options are worrisome, say the people on the benches. The problem for Russia in complying with treaty provisions on production facilities is that, unlike the United States where chemicals for weapons were brewed at military factories erected for that singular purpose, its chemical agents were manufactured in massive commercial factories. Thousands of people depend on those factories for their livelihood.