Arctic oil spill on Valdez scale
Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared a state of emergency in a region of northern Siberia after a huge oil spill turned a river crimson and threatened to inflict significant damage on the Arctic environment.
More than 20,000 tons of diesel leaked into the Ambarnaya River near the city of Norilsk May 29, after a fuel tank collapsed at a power plant. Norilsk Nickel, which owns the plant, said in a statement that thawing permafrost had caused one of the tank’s pillars to collapse. The oil spread more than 10 kilometres from the site.
The accident is one of the biggest oil spills in modern Russian history, said Aleksei Knizhnikov of the environmentalist group WWF Russia. In a statement, Greenpeace Russia compared the discharge to the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in Alaska in 1989.
The Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal inquiry and detained the plant’s manager, Vyacheslav Starostin.
Putin was angry that he only learned of the spill on Sunday, and, after declaring the state of emergency on Wednesday, denounced company officials in a video conference that was broadcast live.
“Why did government agencies only find out about this two days after the fact?” Putin said. “Are we going to learn about emergency situations from social media?”
Putin said he would ask investigators to look into the spill to make a clear assessment of how officials reacted to the accident.
Norilsk Nickel is the world’s largest producer of platinum and nickel, and the company is no stranger to environmental disasters.
It was responsible for a “blood river,” also in Siberia, in 2016, and one of its plants has belched so much sulphur dioxide, a major cause of acid rain, that it is surrounded by a dead zone of tree trunks and mud about twice the size of Rhode Island.
The company, along with the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, dispatched hundreds of personnel to clean up the mess.
So far, Norilsk Nickel said, they had managed to gather up only about 340 tons of the oil.
Special containment booms were installed in the Ambarnaya River in an effort to prevent the spill from entering the nearby Lake Pyasino and, after that, the Kara Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean.
Elena Panova, the Russian deputy minister of national resources and the environment, said Thursday during an online news conference that it would take at least 10 years for the local ecosystem to recover, echoing the sentiments of Russian environmentalists.