As Russian oil spill fouls beaches, locals fume over official response – the Washington Post

Over the past month, the popular Black Sea resort beaches of Russia’s Krasnodar region have been transformed into a scene out of a dystopian sci-fi film, with thousands of workers in white hazmat suits swarming the blackened coast amid dead birds and dolphins.

The workers’ task is grueling and repetitive: manually sifting tons of sand and bagging large clumps of contaminated soil to remove the toxic black sludge from the beaches. Waves bring fresh deposits of the tar-like substance, and the work begins again.

This Sisyphean cleanup is a result of a mid-December incident in which two aging oil tankers were caught in a storm and broke in half in the Kerch Strait, spilling 2,500 to 4,500 tons of fuel oil into the Black Sea, according to Greenpeace. An estimated 40 miles of Krasnodar’s coastline has been affected, with the oil also washing up across the strait in Crimea.

Even as volunteers from across Russia flooded in to help, the crisis was at first largely ignored by local and federal officials, highlighting a pervasive lack of official concern over the numerous environmental disasters in the country often resulting from negligence, according to Russian scientists and environmental activists.

“It is an unprecedented event,” Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, chief scientist at the Institute of Water Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told broadcaster RBC. “This is the most serious environmental disaster in Russia since the beginning of the 21st century.” He estimated that without extensive human intervention, it would take 15 to 20 years for the ecosystem to restore itself…