Oil spill in the Black Sea. Oil flooded onto the coastline around the town of Anapa, a seaside resort in southwest Russia, and it was placed under a regime of “emergency situation”Tuesday, December 17, announced the town hall. In addition to this town of 90,000 inhabitants, four smaller towns in the area are also affected. Rescuers and volunteers are trying to clean the coast, said the regional governor, who visited the site.
The ecological disaster was caused by the sinking on Sunday of two oil tankers in the Kerch Strait, which separates Russia from the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia. THE Volgoneft-212 sank during the storm and the Volgoneft-239 was badly damaged. The latter, built in 1973, did not have navigation authorization, says the Russian agency RIA Novosti, after consulting the maritime register. One person died and 26 crew members were evacuated, according to authorities. The next day, the Russian government admitted that the incident had led to a fuel oil spill, raising fears of the formation of a slick pushed by the winds towards the coasts.
Several videos show birds stuck in fuel oil or beaches littered with oil cakes. Russian blogger Yuri Ozarovsky has published numerous photos showing the extent of the damage to local wildlife. “Poor little dolphin”he writes to accompany the image of a soiled marine animal. The scale of the drama appears clearly in his images, while the weather is difficult, with a beach beaten by the winds. “With the current, the oil slick moves towards the large central beach”he told the media Agentstvo. “Residents say they have to close the windows because of the smell, which is as strong as in a refinery.”
This blogger adds that residents came to clean the beaches, despite the difficulty of the task. “They have no place to store the collected piles of fuel”writes Yuri Ozarovsky. “On the instructions of the governor, an operational headquarters has been deployed (…) and an operation to eliminate the consequences is underway”said the Anapa town hall, without giving further details. “The work is made difficult by strong gusts of wind, which reach 29 m/s in places”according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, cited by the RIA Novosti agency.
The authorities are now planning to install floating booms of 150 to 200 meters to protect the lagoon in the village of Blagoveshchenskaya, located between the Kerch Strait and the city of Anapa. To make matters worse, another Russian tanker, the Volgoneft-109with 14 people on board, issued a distress signal in the Black Sea following “loss of fuelRIA Novosti reported. The captain reported that the ship, which was carrying 4,000 tonnes of fuel oil, had a leak in a tank, but that the hull had not ruptured.
In Ukraine, the Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources denounced on Monday, “a threat of large-scale environmental disaster in the Black Sea”.
