August 21, 2014
Environmental authorities in the Komi region (Russia) upheld Greenpeace Russia’s proposals on how to amend the gaps in regulations that let the oil pour from old, rusty pipelines. They plan to forward them to the provincial parliament and then to the Russian State Duma to develop amendments on the federal level, with the aim that irresponsible oil business will be held liable.
20 years have passed since the worst ever onland oil catastrophe in the world, when an old pipeline broke in Komi and thousands of tones of oil flooded forests and rivers reaching as far as the Arctic Ocean. Since that time the situation changed but still almost every spring comes a disaster for local communities of farmers and fishermen: the rivers bring black ice from fresh oil spills.
Greenpeace Russia arranged a meeting to seek for a solution in the very place where the disaster happened: the town of Usinsk, the oil capital of Komi region, in sub-Arctic Russia. It was a challenge to get all the stakeholders to sit at the same negotiating table: outraged Indigenous peoples, oil companies representatives, and authorities from federal and local state agencies.
The discussion was intense. “Together with Greenpeace we stand for harsh punishment for concealing accidents at the pipelines, all the way up to criminal liability. The companies should be obliged to report any leakage of oil products into the environment and pay higher fines in case they fail to remedy the violations”, stated Roman Polshvedkin, deputy Minister of Natural Resources of the Komi Region.
“We totally support the Greenpeace vision, and most of their 17 recommendations”, concluded Islamudin Astarkhanov, deputy head of Federal Service for Natural Resource Use Supervision in Komi.
The oil companies were resisting any change. Lukoil announced that they had invested 18 billion rubles (500 million dollars) into environmental activities in the region, beating its own target by 14%. Rosneft’s branch in Komi started its report with self-promotion: “We are listed among the 100 best enterprises in Russia in terms of environmental safety! We had no accidents in the last 5 years.”
Rusvietpetro (a joint venture with a Vietnamese oil company) had little to boast of because they were responsible for a huge leakage into the Kolva River last summer that caused so much damage that hundreds of workers have been cleaning it up for almost a year.
Still they announced that they already made a solid compensation to the affected villagers: they released 200,000 young fishes into the same heavily polluted river.
If everything works well, why are there thousands of accidents every year in Russia, at facilities of almost all big oil companies? Why are the rural areas dying out because Indigenous People are no longer able to feed themselves from their own land?
One of the leaders of the Save the Pechora movement Fedor Terentiev said the Kolva river is a better indicator of the condition of the environment: “For the second year in a row oil is flowing down the river. Our life depends on nature, and we are ready to monitor the areas if the companies are not able to do this themselves. But these areas where the spills happen are absolutely closed for people, gates and roads are blocked and there are guards everywhere”.
None of the oil companies’ managers could find a plausible explanation for the 200 polluted sites that Greenpeace volunteers revealed in Komi during their patrol.
Source: http://www.greenpeace.org/russia/en/news/21-08-2014_oil_leaking_through_gaps_in_legislation/