“The oil spill in the Black Sea was initially very large, and now the worst-case scenario has worked” – ecologist

As soon as we learned on August 7 that an accidental spill had occurred, we launched our system of social and environmental monitoring of accidents, which has been implemented since the beginning of this year and includes the interpretation of space images. Already in the evening of August 7, the spill was a quarter of a square kilometer in size, its length was about 1200 meters.

A day later, on August 8, in the evening photo, we saw that the event was developing according to the worst scenario – the area of ​​pollution of the water area increased many times and, according to our estimates, reached 94 square kilometers.

There are many recreational areas in this region, including Abrau-Dyurso. Unfortunately, we do not rule out that pollution will move further north. It has already reached the coast of some reserves, which is the worst case scenario, since these are specially protected areas of the highest category. It can be said that despite all attempts by rescuers to contain the spill, their actions were not successful.

With such a huge area of ​​pollution, the effect is obtained when oil spreads out in a very thin layer tens of microns thick. And these are only light fractions of oil, this is the smallest part of all spilled fuel. We predict that some of the oil has already entered the water column in the form of droplets, some has dissolved, It will stay in the water column much longer than film pollution, and this will have the most toxic effect on living organisms and lead to further pollution of beach areas …

It is not yet possible to estimate the damage, but we are already talking about billions of rubles – this is only sea pollution. It is not yet clear what the estimates for the coastline will be – there is still a lot of work to be done.

The exact cause of the incident remains to be determined. But it is already clear that the so-called remote mooring device has broken down – in fact, it is a flexible hose that connects tankers. Some reasons led to its rupture, and oil began to flow to the sea surface under high pressure.