The scale of the environmental disaster caused by the wreck of two oil product tankers in the Kerch Strait turned out to be larger than initially stated by the authorities. About 5,000 tons of fuel oil remain at the bottom of the Black Sea, “it is a kind of jelly-like mass that is not moving anywhere,” the governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratiev, said on Saturday.
On January 2, the Russian Ministry of Transport assured that as a result of the accident, about 2.4 thousand tons of fuel oil out of 9.2 thousand tons carried by tankers Volgoneft-239 and Volgoneft-212 fell into the sea. At the same time, cleaning works have been carried out practically since the wreck, which occurred on December 15. During this time only from the coast of Anapa and Temryuk district of Krasnodar Krai was removed about 155 thousand tons of sand with fuel oil. Another 43.5 thousand tons of contaminated soil were collected in the annexed Crimea. Also 19.1 thousand m² of water area was cleaned there, and in Kuban – 38.7 thousand m². On January 10, during an inspection of the stern of the grounded tanker Volgoneft-239, a new leak with an area of about 2.8 thousand square meters was discovered. Fuel oil was also thrown onto the shore of the Sea of Azov near the occupied Berdyansk in Zaporizhzhya Region, the length of the contaminated area amounted to 14.5 km, the Russian-appointed governor, Yevhen Balitskyy, said. At the same time, a federal disaster response headquarters was formed only on January 12 after the displeasure of President Vladimir Putin, who said the authorities were not doing enough to minimize the damage. Emergencies Ministry head Aleksandr Kurenkov arrived in Anapa to personally supervise the progress of the work. The Kremlin also refused for a long time to introduce a federal emergency regime because of the fuel oil spill in the Black Sea: initially, Putin suggested limiting it to sending “an additional group of EMERCOM troops.
