More than a month after the sinking of two oil tankers in the Black Sea, the Russian and Ukrainian coasts are suffering an oil spill with serious environmental consequences. In the Anapa region, the courage and determination of volunteers are not enough to compensate for the shortcomings of the Russian authorities.
On a huge beach north of Anapa, in southern Russia, Lena scoops up large cakes of fuel oil hidden under the sand with a shovel. Lena is a volunteer, arriving from Saint Petersburg at the beginning of January. She wears a respiratory mask to protect herself from the fumes of heavy fuel oil escaping from the holds of the two tankers which sank in a storm on December 15. “At first, I thought the state was going to sort everything outexplains the young woman, currently unemployed. And then I understood that there was no point in waiting for someone to release a budget, or for people to write petitions. I had nothing to do, so I came here. You just have to get out there and get your hands dirty.”
Over the past month, the Anapa region has seen thousands of volunteers arrive from all over Russia. In front of the cellar lent by a local winemaker and hastily transformed into a hospital for oiled birds, Olga takes a break. Few birds have arrived in the center in recent hours. But she fears that residents will bring new ones with the forecast gales at sea. At the beginning of January, there were hundreds. “We installed everything ourselves, we are volunteers, says this thirty-year-old receptionist in a hotel. And clearly we weren’t prepared for such a large number of birds to arrive. They were completely covered in fuel oil, only their eyes were visible. We worked 24 hours a day, we didn’t sleep. And then ornithologists arrived to show us what to do, the treatment protocols. They were great, luckily they came.”
Despite the mobilization of volunteers, thousands of birds died. The pollution has reached Taman Bay where there is a bird sanctuary where thousands of birds migrate every winter. At the beginning of January, specialists estimated that 80% of oiled birds could not be saved. At least 58 dolphins were also found dead on the beaches. But it is impossible to draw up a clear assessment of the consequences of this oil spill. The authorities do not provide any precise information. The Russian Academy of Sciences has nevertheless admitted that it is the worst ecological disaster the country has experienced in the 21st century.
On the beach where Lena and around thirty volunteers work, thousands of small black spots dot the sand. “It’s fuel oil, explains Alexandre, who coordinates the team’s work. And if you move forward 50 meters, you will see large cakes of fuel oil, which have been covered by sand. It is important to remove both the surface layer and the deep layer. Because when the weather gets warmer, the oil will become liquid and flow out, which will be dangerous for animals and people.”
The two tankers which sank on December 15 were carrying Fuel “M100”, a heavy, low-quality petroleum product. “This fuel solidifies at a temperature below 25°explains Pavel Pechenkin, from the Krasnodar region operational center. Unlike gasoline, it does not float on the surface but sinks to the bottom or is found in the water column. It is therefore very difficult to eliminate, especially since there has been no disaster with this type of product in the world.“
These difficulties, admitted by the Russian authorities, do not seem to have made them decide to act quickly. The federal emergency regime, which allows the government to release funds to fight against this type of event, was only declared eleven days after the shipwrecks. And on January 9, Vladimir Putin had to admit that the measures taken were insufficient by publicly lecturing his services. Immediately, as always in such cases, local and federal officials seemed to increase their activity on social networks and began to communicate in all directions. Appointed to head the commission responsible for combating the oil spill, Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Saveliev affirmed on January 15 from Anapa that all state resources were now mobilized.
But this is not what Roman, who coordinates volunteers, notices. “Throughout December and early January, there were a lot of volunteers, but it was chaos, we didn’t know who should do what, there was no organization, deplores this young man from Irkutsk, in Siberia. At the beginning of January, we were told that all the equipment had arrived and that there was no longer a need for volunteers. Today we see that this is not the case, the number of volunteers has decreased and in places as remote as this, there are very few.”he notes while looking at the thirty or so volunteers he supervises on a beach several kilometers long. Alexandre, the other coordinator, adds : “There are five times fewer volunteers, but there are more municipal employees provided by the municipalities.
“Frankly, the motivation of volunteers and municipal employees is very different. The quality of cleaning is very different.”
Alexandre, one of the volunteer coordinatorsat franceinfo
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“If the volunteers are here from morning to night and give everything they have… I don’t mean anything bad, but what we see with municipal employees is that there is fuel left when they leave”adds Alexandre.
And then the cleaning work currently being done with shovels and by hand seems insignificant compared to the immensity of the coastline soiled by oil cakes. On a beach in central Anapa, we meet Vladimir Kalyaiev, from the Moscow Institute of Science and Technology. This oil spill specialist takes a handful of sand in his hand from a place where dozens of volunteers collected huge patches of fuel oil three weeks before.
After a few moments, pieces of black color appear which begin to melt in his hand. “After the main pollution was cleared, several storms brought large quantities of small oil fragments onto the beachexplains the scientist. People try to remove them by hand, but without heavy-duty means, such as bacterial treatment or chemicals, there is currently no prospect of the beach becoming as clean as it was.” he says. Behind him, four volunteers are working with a sieve, patiently trying to remove fuel pellets…
In conjunction with the authorities, Vladimir Kalyaiev is currently testing certain solutions to mitigate the consequences of the oil spill. Behind him, nets stretched at the edge of the water, make it possible to stop small particles of fuel oil constantly brought back by the waves. But how can we protect hundreds of kilometers of potentially affected coastline? ? The pollution has already reached the coasts of Crimea, the occupied south of Ukraine in the Sea of Azov and some specialists believe that it will not take long to arrive on the Georgian or even Turkish coasts. And the response from the Russian authorities does not seem up to par.
Traveling tens of kilometers of coastline, we saw very few clearance machines and there was a shortage of specialists. Arthur, a volunteer from Moscow, tells us how he managed, with a few friends, to finance the arrival of ornithologists on site. “We managed to collect 1 500 000 roubles (environ 15 000 euros) to pay their salaries, explains this young man who works in IT. It’s true, we are going above the State, but I start from the principle that the animals do not wait to know who will pay the civil servants.”
On January 20, more than a month after the disaster, the pumping of the tanks from the wreck of one of the two tankers finally began. This half of the wreck was, however, stranded on the coast and quite easy to access. The other part of the tanker is at the bottom of the water, as is the other tanker, which broke in two during the storm of December 15. Between them, they carried 9 000 tonnes of fuel oil. Russian authorities say about a quarter has spilled into the sea, but the rest is still inside the holds.
A version doubted by the Russian ecological activist in exile, Evgueni Simonov. “No independent expert has been allowed to go to the bottom of the waterenrages this researcher, member of the working group on the environmental consequences of the war in Ukraine. We are told that there is no leak, and then we see on satellite images that new fuel slicks are coming to the surface. This means that everything that has been cleaned up on the shore of Anapa will be wiped out by the arrival of a new slick of fresh fuel oil.” On January 21, new fuel oil leaks were reported in the Sea of Azov by the Kuban operational center, which decided to expand the monitoring zone.
The lack of transparency of the Russian authorities is blatant, even in the search for the causes of the disaster. However, the Russian press reported what the tankers Volgoneft 239 et Volgoneft 212 were more than 50 years old, that they had been designed to navigate on rivers or at sea in calm conditions. Both should have been reformed long ago. One of them had even recently lost its certificate of airworthiness according to the daily Izvestia. Were the two ships part of the “ghost fleet” used by Russia to export its oil by circumventing sanctions? In the Duma, on January 15, the communist deputy Nikolai Kolomeitsev called for the opening of a commission of inquiry on the subject. SoThe initiative was blocked by the ruling United Russia party.
