The largest man-made disaster in the region occurred in the Kerch Strait. This is how representatives of the international environmental organization Greenpeace called the shipwreck that occurred on December 15. CEMAAT's correspondent found out from experts what damage has already been done and what is to come.

The shipwrecks of two Russian Volgoneft tankers occurred within one hour. Both vessels were transporting fuel oil. One tanker had its bow torn off during a storm and sank. The second one suffered a hull breach, but managed to run aground to avoid sinking. Experts quickly determined what could have gone wrong in a seven-point storm with river-sea tankers.

According to Andriy Klymenko, head of the Black Sea Institute for Strategic Studies, a vessel with a severed bow was restricted to operating in coastal sea waters with wave heights of up to two and a half meters, and the second one was restricted to only two meters. On that day, the waves were three and a half meters high, and the wind speed was higher than the thresholds for these ships.

Perhaps this would not have had such fatal consequences if it were not for the design features of the Volgoneft tankers. They were redesigned for modern use by cutting out the middle part of the hull. It was the welds in the place of the “cut” that most likely failed to withstand the load, and so one vessel immediately lost its bow, and the other got a huge hole. In general, experts emphasize the extreme unreliability of these vessels, which have lost more than a thousand sailors over the past thirty years.

The total volume of fuel oil on both tankers exceeded eight thousand tons. The Russian authorities have already admitted that there was a “partial leak” but are avoiding assessing the extent of the oil spill into the water. Meanwhile, Sergei Stanichny, an expert at the Marine Hydrophysical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has estimated from satellite images that approximately 1,500 tons of fuel oil have been released from each tanker. Russian Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology Alexander Kozlov said that it was premature to estimate the amount of fuel oil that had entered the sea, as some of it remained inside the tankers, and that helicopters were searching for fuel oil spills to prevent them from reaching the coast.

The next day, the Russian Nature Watch stated that the helicopters had failed in their task, the spill site could not be localized, and the first spots had already reached the coastline in the Anapa region, polluting several tens of kilometers of coastline. At the time of writing, the head of the occupation authorities of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, claimed that no pollution of the Crimean coastline had been detected.

However, a representative of the local Ecology and Peace organization, Andriy Artov, predicted that due to a change in wind direction, the “oiling” zone could stretch from Kerch to the Opuk Nature Reserve. Crimean residents recall that seventeen years ago, when a tanker of the same Volgoneft project sank as a result of a similar storm and a thousand tons of oil products spilled into the water area, it was enough to pollute tens of kilometers of both banks of the strait.

Coastal pollution is one of the main environmental risks of such a man-made disaster. Thousands of seagulls, cormorants, and other waterfowl are at risk. They need to have their feathers cleaned, otherwise they will not be able to fly and will die of hypothermia. Coastal plants also have minimal chances of survival with so many toxic substances being washed ashore and penetrating the soil. In addition, oiled beaches cannot be used for recreation in the summer without large-scale reclamation. We are talking about replacing all the soil to a depth of half a meter.

However, the Black Sea ecology within a radius of hundreds, if not thousands of square kilometers, is facing “black” days. “Because of the storm, this layer of fuel oil that spilled from the tankers will be broken into small droplets by the waves. And these droplets will be scattered over a large area, and it's hard for me to say how large,” shared his fears environmentalist Igor Shkradyuk. In his opinion, hundreds or even thousands of square kilometers of the sea will be polluted to almost the entire depth - from the surface to the bottom. And toxic substances will accumulate in the gills of fish.

A film of any oil product is toxic to living organisms on direct contact. In addition, it impedes sunlight and prevents oxygen from reaching the upper layers of water: all types of marine life, from plankton to large fish and dolphins, suffer from this. “The plankton will die, the small fish will have nothing to eat, they will also die. It's not a disaster, of course, but the population of commercial fish, those that live in the strait area, may be negatively affected, meaning their number will decrease,” said Konstantin Rabotyagov, an associate professor of chemistry at the Crimean University. 

However, the main unpredictability of all the consequences is that some of the fuel oil has already “sunk to the bottom.” Most experts and even Russian officials agree that part of the fuel oil did not float away, but due to the low temperature of the sea water settled to the bottom or drifted in the water column at some depth. Serhiy Alemov, a laboratory worker at the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, noted that if oil products settle to the bottom, the consequences can be long-lasting and quite serious. Over time, when the water warms up, the bottom deposits of fuel oil will start to become secondary polluted, and new discharges will occur. In this case, the severe consequences will last for several years.

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