 |
| Slick: Some 30,000 birds along the Strait of Kerch, where this one struggled yesterday, have perished. Alexander Natruskin/Reuters |
Black Sea oil spill blamed on Russia's lax standards
Environmentalists and critics say the country's booming energy industry has failed to enforce adequate standards.
By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 15, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
Moscow - Sunday's Black Sea storm was admittedly one of the worst on record. But nature's ferocity may pale next to human recklessness as an explanation for what Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov described as "the biggest mass sinking of ships" in the country's history.
"You can't blame everything on the weather," noted Mr. Zubkov, as he opened an inquiry into the disaster, in which an aged river tanker spewed at least 560,000 gallons of fuel oil in the narrow Strait of Kerch – nearly 10 times the size of San Francisco's Nov. 7 spill.
As Russia's oil exports ramp up amid spiking global prices that reached almost $100 per barrel last week, officials say ecological protection is improving. But environmentalists and critics of the burgeoningenergy industry say standards are applied selectively and warn that Russia's oil exports travel through ill-maintained pipelines, some of which are four decades old. Much domestic transport, meanwhile, operates far below world standards, they contend.
"It is the goal of the Russian government to export as much oil as possible while the prices are high and, since they are obeying official policy, the oil companies often feel they can ignore safety concerns with impunity," says Vladimir Slivyak, head of Ecodefense, an independent environmental watchdog based in Kaliningrad. "Nobody thinks about safety, everybody thinks about money," he says.
The sunken Russian oil tanker, the Volganeft-139, was a riverboat not equipped for operation on the open sea and should never have been there, experts say. The captain of that and several other ships set off into the narrow and dangerous Strait of Kerch in defiance of weather warnings, for which they may face legal action. Three bodies have washed ashore, five men are missing, and up to 30,000 birds have perished in the wake of the shipwrecks and resultant oil spill.
Better standards, but fairly applied?
Oleg Mitvol, deputy chief of Russia's official environmental protection agency, says he can't comment on alleged violations in the mass sinking of ships at Kerch since the matter is under criminal investigation but insists that ecological protection is improving in Russia's oil industry.
"Companies didn't think about environmental safety at all until we started inspecting them stringently," he says. He cites his recent inspection of the private LukOil's operations in the Arctic territory of Komi, site of a 1994 accident in which 33.6 million gallons of oil flooded into the fragile tundra, where he forced the company to pledge about $3 billion for new safety technology. "Russian companies are learning to work to world standards," he says.
RSS feed
