The town of Alchevsk is located in the Luhansk Oblast in south-eastern Ukraine. It has a population of roughly 120,000 and is one of the major industrial centres in the Donets Basin. It is a fairly young town, founded in 1895 as town focused on iron works. The town is still heavily dependent on Alchevsk Iron & Steel Works (OJSC) and Alchevsk Coke-Chemical Plant. Between 1931 and 1961, the town was named Voroshilovsk. It was then renamed Kommunarsk and this name was kept until 1992.
In January 2006, unusually cold winter weather caused an underground heat pipe to crack and this lead to a collapse of the district heating system. About 60,000 residents found themselves without heating and was force to relay on electric heaters. Within a few days, the sewage system froze since it no longer held any warm tap water. The accident occurred on January 22 and by February 11 dozens of buildings where still without any heat, despite the efforts of the engineering teams sent to Alchevsk by the Ukrainian government. Children had to be evacuated to warmer parts of Ukraine. An investigation showed that the heating system suffered from long-time neglect and it was also especially vulnerable to this type of accident since it depended on no more than two boilers and a few main pipelines.
