Volunteers clean up oil on the Black Sea coast in Anapa. Photo: Krasnodar region headquarters
Russia’s chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin has ordered a criminal case to be opened into the poor organisation of an oil spill clean-up effort after two tankers ran aground in the Black Sea earlier this month, the Investigative Committee said on Tuesday.
According to the committee, Bastrykin was prompted by numerous complaints from local residents who said the clean-up effort was being carried out entirely by volunteers who had not been provided with adequate protective gear or equipment.
The committee added that the authorities had not organised proper waste disposal, leading to “significant pollution of water and soil, mass destruction of flora and fauna”.
The clean-up effort began in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region on 17 December, two days after two tankers, which were each carrying over 4,000 tons of oil, ran aground in high winds in the Kerch Strait, which runs between Russian-occupied Crimea and Russia proper.
Up to 200,000 tons of soil in the Krasnodar region may have been affected by oil from the incident, 14,000 tons of which have already been removed, Minister of Natural Resources Alexander Kozlov estimated on Monday.
Local volunteers recorded a video for Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin the same day, in which they criticised the government’s response to the disaster, saying they had been “forced to collect fuel oil with shovels, breathing toxic fumes”, while bags of oil had not been removed from the beach in time.
