Fire and water

First flashback, triggered by a fire engine racing past some days ago - a fire in one of the chemical plants in Chelyabinsk. Maksim isn't at work that day, he is walking along a street near his home when suddenly a fire engine (a ZIL painted red with a water tank on its back) races past towards one of the factories, where a column of greasy, yellowish-black smoke is rising to the sky. I don't know what was burning there, but it clearly was noxious - the bitter, acrid and somehow metallic taste in the mouth and a stinging in the throat that Maksim experienced stayed with me for at least one hour after the flashback, and as I write this, it comes back with full intensity.
The street along which Maksim walked was rather wide, one of those elegant streets built for representation, and there were poplars or similar small trees with bright green leaves along its sides. The trees can't have been very old, so the street must have been newly-built or refurbished, perhaps due to the rapid growth Chelyabinsk experienced during and after the war.

Flashback number two - Maksim is watching the newsreel in the cinema (still in black and white), and they show the inauguration of a hydroelectric plant somewhere in the Far East of Russia, on one of the large streams in Siberia.
Maksim sees the enormous jets of water gushing into the turbines (?) for the first time, and he is impressed by the enormous power that water can have, even more so when the presenter reads out the technical data of the new plant ("so and so many turbines with an output of so and so much each, so many thousands litres of water go past them every hour, so and so many tons of concrete were used for the dam wall...")
As he sits comfortably in his upholstered seat in the cinema, he thinks that building this plant must have been a real effort, and at the same time he is grateful that he only has to drive trucks, which isn't that hard if you really look at it rationally - at least that is what he thinks...