Five ships have sunk in the strongest storm the Black Sea has seen in 30 years. An oil tanker was broken in half by 6-meter high waves in Kerch Strait and now Russian and Ukrainian parts of the coast face the threat of unprecedented pollution.
Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov and Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu personally flew to the Black Sea coast on Tuesday to oversee the operation to clean the sea and the shore from the fuel oil spill. The minister said that the owners of the ships which caused the pollution will be sued for environmental damage. He also said that the rescuers will clear the sea and the coast in 40 or 45 days.
"What has happened in the Kerch Strait has already been called the most massive shipwreck in modern Russian history. The consequences for the environment are the most depressing and what is important - people have died and five people are still missing," Zubkov said.
The disaster in the Kerch Strait took place on Sunday when the Black Sea was hit by an unusually heavy storm. Three bodies have been washed ashore after the shipwrecks.
Five ships have sank and one of them - the Volgoneft-139 - sank, spilling at least 2,000 tons of fuel oil into the cold sea. The ship was built in Bulgaria in 1978 and had a double hull design required by international safety standards, but she storm was so strong it broke the tanker in two pieces.
Three of the sunken ships were freighters carrying about seven tons of granulated sulfur. These ships are now on the seabed but will be salvaged when weather conditions allow.
The accounts of the reasons of the disaster are still being debated. Captains say they only received one warning from the weather reporting center and that it came too late, when the waves in the Kerch Strait were already too high. Apart from that, the seamen said that the traffic control center in the port Kavkaz of had barred the ships from entering the relatively calm Sea of Azov and about 60 ships had to be anchored in the narrow strait in extreme weather conditions.
The weather center and port authorities insist that the crews had enough time to move their ships to safety and that the disaster happened mostly due to human errors and the poor state of ships. The sunken Volgoneft-123 tanker was old and its shipping company is currently bankrupt and without financial means for ship maintenance.
On Wednesday, Russian prosecutors said they were starting a criminal case against the captain of the Kavkaz port who is accused of failing to fulfill his duty. It has been established that the port authorities issued just one bad weather warning in the strait - at approximately 10 p.m. on Saturday when the conditions in the sea were relatively calm.
The cleanup operation is being carried out by the Russian Emergencies Ministry with the help of the border guards and marines stationed near the site of the disaster. The efforts are stalled by low temperatures and strong waves. In such conditions the fuel oil becomes solid and drops to the seabed and special chemicals sprayed on oil slick to clean it work poorly. Apart from that, the storm in the area has calmed but not ended - high waves prevent the special vessels from fighting with the pollution.
A large group of volunteers, mostly students from nearby cities, arrived to the Russian Black Sea coast on Thursday to help the rescuers and military servicemen.
On Wednesday night, Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters that those engaged in the operation had collected 873.5 tons of fuel oil or about 25 percent of the total amount spilled into the sea. He added that his ministry's specialists hoped to localize the pollution in seven to ten days.
Experts agree that the oil spill has already inflicted heavy damage to the region's environment, first of all to the fish and the bird population. Up to 30,000 birds have already died of cold as their feathers became glued with oil. Environmentalists say that the damaging effect of the spill will multiply as the oil kills fish which are now in the spawning period of their life cycle.
Most of the spill's damage was to the Russian coastline, but is now moving towards the Ukrainian coast and to the nature preserve on the Taman Peninsula. To prevent the disaster from spreading, Russia installed a 200-meter long boom barrier closing the strait. Russian authorities also proposed to build a temporary earthen dam in the strait and now wait for the Ukrainian government's approval. Russia tried to build such a dam in 2003 but the project was canceled as Ukraine considered it a claim on its territory.
As of Thursday, Ukraine has not commented on the dam proposal, but Ukrainian regulators demanded that Russia stop pumping the remaining oil from the sunken Volganeft-139 tanker after it started leaking again.
By Kirill Bessonov
