(Reuters) – Russia declared a regional emergency on Saturday in Crimea, which it captured from Ukraine in 2014, as workers on both sides of the Kerch Strait cleared tonnes of contaminated sand and soil following an oil spill in the Black Sea last month.
Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-installed governor of the city of Sevastopol, said new traces of minor pollution needed to be urgently eliminated and declared a state of emergency in the city, giving authorities more power to make quick decisions such as ordering citizens to evacuate their homes.
The Kerch Strait runs between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov and separates the Kerch Peninsula from Crimea and Russia’s Krasnodar region.
Rescue workers have now cleared more than 86,000 tons of contaminated sand and soil, the Emergency Situations Ministry said on Saturday. The oil leaked from two aging tankers that were hit by a storm on December 15. One sank and the other ran aground.
More than 10,000 people worked to scoop up viscous, smelly fuel oil from sandy beaches in and around Anapa, a summer resort. Environmental groups have reported the deaths of dolphins, porpoises and seabirds.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said via messaging app Telegram that oil-contaminated soil had been collected in Russia’s wider Kuban region and Crimea, whose annexation by Russia has not been recognized by most other countries.
The ministry published video footage of dozens of workers in protective suits loading bags of dirt onto excavators, while others shoveled dirt from the sand with shovels.
Russia’s Transport Ministry said this week that experts had determined that about 2,400 tons of oil products had spilled into the sea, a smaller spill than initially feared.
When the disaster struck, state media reported that the stricken tankers, both more than 50 years old, were carrying a total of about 9,200 tons (62,000 barrels) of oil products.
The spill involved M100 grade heavy fuel oil which solidifies at a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) and, unlike other oil products, does not float to the surface but sinks to the bottom or remains suspended in the water column .
(This story has been corrected to say that Razvozhaev is governor of Sevastopol, not Crimea, in paragraph 2)
