Russians took part in a sea bath in a seaside resort in the south of the country, an Orthodox ritual to celebrate Epiphany, regional authorities said on Saturday evening, despite the oil spill ravaging these coasts.
The swim, supervised by a priest and lifeguards, took place on a beach in Anapa, a seaside town on the Black Sea in the Krasnodar region, the local crisis management service said.
A large-scale oil spill has polluted the area, as far as annexed Crimea, since the sinking of two aging oil tankers on December 15.
January 19, the day of Epiphany in the Orthodox Christian tradition, is celebrated by tens of thousands of Russians who usually immerse themselves in holes dug in the ice, on ponds or rivers.
They thus commemorate the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan.
A few dozen residents bundled up in warm coats were gathered on Anapa beach, according to images published by the crisis management service.
A resident, in a swimsuit, rushes into the waves.
Dive your head
Vladimir Baloukov, a swimmer whose comments were relayed by the crisis management service, assured that there was “no fuel oil”.
“The water is very clean, I even dove my head in,” he says in the video, his hair wet and dressed in a bathrobe.
On Sunday morning, “fragments of fuel oil” brought by the rough waves were again found on the beaches of Anapa, the crisis management service said.
At the beginning of January, part of the city’s coastline had even been covered with thick layers of this toxic fuel oil.
-The pollution has caused medical problems for some of the many volunteers helping to clean up the coast.
Around 150 of them have already required medical treatment, three of whom were hospitalized, regional Health Minister Yevgeny Filippov said on Wednesday.
The Russian authorities and these volunteers are carrying out a major clean-up campaign, but the situation continues to cause concern as the fuel oil settles on the coasts.
The two ships were carrying more than 9,000 tonnes of fuel oil.
More than 168,000 tons of contaminated sand and soil have already been collected, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said on Sunday.
Authorities now say they are pumping the fuel oil still present in one of the stranded tankers, the Volgoneft-239.
In a video published on Saturday by the crisis management service, the boat is visible, surrounded by a slick of oil and a strip of sand.
Several cetaceans, including porpoises, have been found dead in recent weeks, according to a specialized Russian NGO.
Russian scientist Viktor Danilov-Danilian, Minister of the Environment in the 1990s, told the Kommersant newspaper that it was “the most serious ecological disaster in Russia since the beginning of the 21st century.”
President Vladimir Putin recently criticized “insufficient” efforts to clean up the oil.
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