Russian oil tanker sinks in Black Sea storm
MOSCOW (AFP) — 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.
