Russian oil tanker sinks in Black Sea storm

Dario Thuburn, Yahoo News 11 Nov 07;

Five-metre (16-feet) high waves smashed apart a Russian tanker on Sunday, spilling 1,300 tonnes of fuel oil into the Black Sea in what environmentalists called an "ecological catastrophe."

Four other cargo ships including three carrying sulphur also sank as winds of up to 108 kilometres (67 miles) an hour battered the Kerch Strait separating the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov.

Rescue services plucked 36 crewmembers from stricken vessels but fears were growing for the fate of 23 missing sailors as weather conditions worsened, reports said.

Forty vessels were evacuated from Kavkaz, a busy Russian commercial port some 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) south of Moscow, officials said. Ten others were forced to stay in the port because of the storm.

Some 300 kilometres further west, high winds sank a cargo ship with 17 sailors on board. Two were rescued and 15 were still missing, officials said.

"This is a major ecological catastrophe," Vladimir Slivyak, head of Ekozashchita, or Ecodefense, a Russian environmental group, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.

"The pollution that has taken place will have to be cleaned up for a long time to come and the consequences will be felt for a year or even more."

Oleg Mitvol, head of the Russian government's environmental monitoring agency Rosprirodnadzor, said: "This is a serious environmental accident that will require a large amount of work.

"This problem may take a few years to solve," he said on the Vesti-24 news channel.

Prosecutors have opened a criminal inquiry for pollution, reports said.

The prow and the stern of the oil tanker, called Volgoneft-139, tore apart in the storm and "around 1,300 tonnes of fuel oil were spilled," a transport ministry spokeswoman told AFP.

Thirteen crew members were stranded in the stern and were later rescued but efforts to limit the oil spill were being hampered by harsh weather conditions, officials said.

A spokesman from the emergency response ministry said a second fuel oil tanker, the Volgoneft-123, had also been damaged in the storm and there had been an "insignificant spill" from the ship.

In November 2002, the Liberian oil tanker Prestige broke up and sank, spewing 64,000 tonnes of fuel oil into the waters and fouling thousands of kilometres (miles) along the Atlantic coast of France, Spain and Portugal.

Russia and Ukraine have set up a joint crisis centre to deal with Sunday's disaster and aircraft were on standby to fly to the area as soon as the weather allows, officials said.

The Volgoneft-139 was carrying fuel oil from the southern Russian city of Samara on the Volga River to an oil terminal in Ukraine, agency reports quoted a Russian official as saying.

Russian Oil Tanker Breaks Up Off Crimea
Dmitry Solovyov, Yahoo News 12 Nov 07;

MOSCOW - A severe storm broke a small Russian oil tanker in two off the Ukrainian port of Kerch on Sunday, spilling up to 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil in what a Russian official said was an "environmental disaster".

The same storm in the Black Sea and Azov Sea also sank four freighters, three carrying sulphur and one with a cargo of scrap metal. The heavy seas also cracked the hull of another oil tanker, but the ship was afloat and not leaking.

The sunken tanker, Volganeft-139, had travelled from the Russian port of Azov and was anchored outside Kerch in Ukraine's eastern Crimea to ride out the weather, when high waves broke its back at around 0445 (0145 GMT) on Sunday, media reported.

The 1978-built tanker, designed primarily for inland and coastal service, was carrying 4,000 tonnes of fuel oil in total when it was hit by the storm, which has knocked out electricity supplies to much of Crimea.

"This problem may take a few years to solve. Fuel oil is a heavy substance and it is now sinking to the seabed," Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of Russia's environment agency Rosprirodnadzor told state-run Vesti-24 television channel.

"This is a very serious environmental disaster."

Environment agency Rosprirodnadzor said some 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil had spilt, but Emergencies Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov told Reuters not more than 1,200 tonnes had leaked.

The tanker's 13 crew members drifted for hours in waves up to 6 metres high aboard the ship's stern before beaching safely a few miles from the bow section, the emergencies ministry said. The crew were safe, it added.

The likely effects of the spill were not immediately clear. A spill over 700 tonnes is considered large, but the biggest ones run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

The polluted area is at the heart of the migration route from central Siberia into the Black Sea of red-throated and black-throated Siberian divers.

"The peak of the migration season is right now," Kees Camphuysen, a marine ornithologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, told Reuters by telephone.

"The quantity (of oil spilt) doesn't matter. One tonne in the wrong place will do a lot of damage while a 100,000 tonnes will do no damage in the centre of the ocean," he said.

The area is also home to porpoises.

STORM TOLL

Almost at the same time as the Volganeft-139 broke up, a freighter carrying 2,000 tonnes of sulphur sank off the port of Kavkaz in the Kerch Strait. Its crew of nine was rescued.

"We hope that in the water sulphur will not form any substances dangerous to humans," Mitvol said.

Several hours later, another freighter carrying sulphur sank off Kavkaz, Interfax news agency quoted the port adminstration as saying, adding three of its crew had been rescued by a Ukrainian ship. The fate of the other eight sailors was unclear.

The same storm, which is expected to rage for up to 3 days, also sank a freighter with scrap metal off Sevastopol in southern Crimea. Two of its crew were rescued, but the fate of the other 15 was unknown, Ukraine's emergencies ministry said.

The hull of the oil tanker, Volganeft-123, cracked after being hit by high waves, but Maxim Stepanenko, Novorossiisk transport prosecutor, told Russian television this tanker was afloat and its oil products were not leaking. (Additional reporting by Peter Graff in London and Natalya Zinets in Kiev; Editing by Matthew Jones)