The cleaning of the waterways will take years

Photo: Irina Yarinskaya Agence France-Presse
The employees of Transneft has put into the river pumps to suck up the dirty water, stained red and held in place by floating barriers.

Three people were arrested Wednesday for their role in the pollution of unprecedented rivers of the Russian Arctic, including the cleanup will take ” years “, following a fuel leak in the fuel tank of a thermal power plant.

In this region of the Great Russian North, the general director of Transneft Siberia, Victor Bronnikov, responsible for a portion of the clean-up operations, told AFP that if the situation was ” stabilized “, the pumping of pollutants was going to last for ” at least eight to ten days.”

But the ” full clean up will take years “, he warned, because special products will be dispersed to decompose, or absorb the diesel could not be pumped after being as prevalent in that swampy area in the spring.

The employees of Transneft has put into the river pumps to suck up the dirty water, stained red and held in place by floating barriers. It is then stored in tanks installed on-site, have found journalists from AFP.

On the front of the court, the head of the company responsible for the tank of diesel sold, Pavel Smirnov, a senior engineer Alexey Stepanov and his deputy Yuri Kuznetsov have been arrested, announced the investigation committee of the Russian. These three managers of the subsidiary of grand group, Russian mining Norilsk Nickel may face up to five years in prison.

They are accused of having continued to operate the tank without performing any repairs the need for which had been established in 2018.

On 29 may, 21 000 tonnes of fuel contained in the tank of a thermal power plant are discharged into the Ambarnaïa and the land near the river, tinting the water purple.

The Russian president then declared a state of emergency and scolded the oligarch Vladimir Potanine, the boss of Norilsk Nickel.

“The tank […] has continued to be used in violation of the rules of safety. As a result, an accident occurs, ” says the Committee of inquiry, which must now decide if he will keep the three suspects in pre-trial detention for a prolonged period of time.

The accident is considered one of the worst due to hydrocarbons in the Russian Arctic, a fragile region where the mining, oil and gas are many, and pollution is a growing problem since the soviet era.

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