Five degrees warmer and — disaster!
Why is the oil pollution in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov not being eliminated?
Now that the Black Sea is getting warmer, the Crimean State Agency of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Ukraine is busy cleaning up the oil slicks that are being washed ashore in the Strait of Kerch. The 20 kilometers of coastline stretching from the dam on Lake Tobechykske to Arshyntsevska Spit — part of the territory of the Cheliadyniv village council — is polluted with oil slicks measuring up to 35 cm in diameter.
As Viktor Musiianenko, the head of the Ecology and the World Republican Association, informed The Day, Crimean ecologists are convinced that all it takes for a real disaster to start in the Crimea is for the air temperature to rise to 18 or 20 degrees. Once the sea water temperature rises another five degrees, the oil slicks drifting in the Black Sea and the piles of sacks filled with a mixture of oil and sand, now stored at the Kerch seaport, will pollute the entire Kerch Peninsula.
“According to volunteers, because of the current sudden and intense warming of the air, the oil has started moving and is coming back into the strait,” Musiianenko told this reporter. “All our pleas to create temporary storage at a distance of five or six kilometers from the sea are being ignored.”
The Kerch seaport was against reloading the collected waste into special sea containers, called “big bags,” and instead suggested transporting the mixture by rail — taking advantage of the cold weather — to a factory in Mykolaiv region, which had agreed to utilize it. “The Kerch seaport is already losing millions in revenue because the dock area is filled with sacks of mazut. If they are loaded into ‘big bags,’ the entire area of the seaport will not be enough to store the collected waste,” said Oleksandr Kotovsky, the port captain.
The Council of Ministers of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea sent a letter to President Yushchenko with a proposal to accept the initiative of the Mykolaiv re- processors and send the mixture to them for utilization. The letter also insists that Ukraine receive compensation for expenses stemming from the liquidation of the consequences of the tragedy and the damage that has been done to the Strait of Kerch, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Azov.
Musiianenko confirmed that during meetings of the Cabinet of Ministers the economy, transport, ecology, and emergency situations ministries received a directive to sort things out before the beginning of the vacation season. “The money has been allocated but nothing is being done. While the bureaucrats are making up their minds, the black oil continues to flow,” Musiianenko said in his interview with The Day. According to forecasts prepared by Ecology and the World, the fuel oil will start appearing on the surface of the sea once the water temperature exceeds 10 degrees. Its rise to the surface will accelerate with warming to 15 degrees, and at 18-20 degrees all the light fractions will float ashore. Then the Black Sea will become a reservoir filled with moving oil slicks.”
Meanwhile, information is being disseminated throughout the Crimea that the Ministry of Ecology is not going to utilize the 5,500 tons of mixed seaweed, oil, and sand that are stored in Kerch. Journalists heard this from Oleksandr Sautin, the deputy chairman of the Crimean Republican Committee on the Environment (Reskompryroda).
“As of today, lawyers are against utilizing the oil because the collected mazut mixture constitutes solid material evidence for suing the guilty parties,” Sautin said. He said that during a meeting between Dmytro Hursky, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection, and the Crimean authorities, the decision was made to reload the plastic bags with the mixture into special sea cargo containers. “Our task is to ensure they do not leak at higher temperatures. They have already been reloaded two or three times. The Ministry of Industrial Policy has ordered that samples from those sacks be tested to evaluate their oozing characteristics.”
Sautin said that the Crimea’s Reskompryroda has evaluated the extent of damages to the coast. “The estimated amount is 88 million hryvnias,” he said. According to the environmental protection ministry, the total amount of material damages, including compensation for the pollution of the sea and the clean-up, is approximately 1.5 billion US dollars. “This figure was announced by the ministry’s inter-departmental commission, which has supplied the Ministry of Justice with facts that will enable it to act as a plaintiff for Ukraine,” Sautin said, adding that “the decision to take legal action will be made on the governmental level.” Meanwhile, the Transport Prosecutor’s Office in Novorossiisk estimates the damage caused by the spilled oil in the Strait of Kerch at USD 898 million.
Viktor Plakyda, the chairman of the Republican Council of Ministers, believes that ecologists’ forecasts about the collapse of the vacation season because of the oil pollution on the southern coast of the Crimea are premature and groundless.
Meanwhile, Kerch-based fishing businesses have already suffered losses from the oil that has accumulated on the bottom of the sea. News agencies have reported that local fishermen claim that between 30 and 50 fishing nets have been damaged by the mazut. Travel agencies have also noted flagging interest in Kerch as a resort area. At the Yalta exhibition “Crimea Resorts and Tourism 2008” held in February Kerch was presented only as a sightseeing destination.
Crimean ecologists have been tirelessly criticizing the authorities for not having a coordinated action plan to monitor the coastline and eliminate the risk of sea and land pollution. They claim that the worst risk comes from the heaps of sacks in the Kerch seaport and the mixture of low-quality fuel oil lying on the bottom of the Strait of Kerch, which has now spread along the entire eastern and southeastern coastlines.
“We are being accused of making unpatriotic statements, scaring away potential tourists, and causing huge economic losses to the Crimea,” Viktor Tarasenko, the head of Ecology and the World, told journalists. He emphasized that there are universal laws of nature that cannot be invalidated by executive decisions of certain government figures, no matter how powerful they may be, particularly when the inter-departmental commission of the Ministry of Environmental Protection has recognized the ecological disaster in the Strait of Kerch as an “extraordinary” one. “This is an international problem and there is no room for childishness,” Tarasenko said.
