A catastrophe of unprecedented proportions: how Russia dealt with the largest oil spill in history in 1994

In August 1994, one of the worst environmental disasters in the modern history of Russia took place in the Komi Republic. The country did not immediately find out about it, and its scale is still called strongly underestimated in the official report. As a result of the breakthrough of a rusted oil pipeline and the actions of oilmen, who continued to pump oil through a leaky pipe for two months after the accident, hundreds of thousands of tons of oil leaked to the surface, which poisoned vast territories, local rivers and got into the ocean. The consequences of the disaster were eliminated for almost 15 years. The Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection of the Komi Republic Roman Polshvedkin, within the framework of the RT project "Unforgotten Stories", told what caused the emergency, due to its scale, which got into the Guinness Book of Records, how they eliminated its consequences and what the authorities and business in the field of ecology learned over the past 25 years.

Record spill

- Roman Viktorovich, few people now remember the sad events that took place in Komi in 1994, despite their monstrous scale.

Remind our readers what happened then?

- The accident on the oil pipeline near the city of Usinsk in August 1994 later hit the Guinness Book of Records as the largest oil spill in history that ever occurred on land.

The first breakthroughs on the 30-kilometer section of the Kharyaga-Vosey-Headworks underground oil pipeline began in the spring, and in August, within three days, about 50 breakthroughs were formed on this 720 mm pipe.

Everything took place in a hard-to-reach swampy area, which greatly complicated both the response to the accident and the further elimination of the consequences.

- As I understand it, the peculiarity of the emergency was that it turned out to be quite extended in time?

- Yes, for two more months after that, the pipeline continued to operate, it was not so easy to stop it.

The fact is that if the northern fields, from which oil with a high paraffin content were flowing through, were stopped, then, in fact, they would have to be re-drilled, which was extremely costly.

- However, your father Viktor Polshvedkin, who at that time headed the Environmental Protection Committee of Usinsk, believed that it was necessary to immediately stop pumping oil, regardless of any further costs.

Do you agree with him?

- Of course, it was necessary to stop.

The scale of the disaster was incredible.

When you fly in a helicopter and see how the earth under you has turned into a sea of oil, it is very difficult to find any censorship words to describe this picture.

You understand that this is not just another spill, but an ecological disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Since the pipe itself was underground, and they continued to pump oil under pressure through it, when it came out to the ground, there was a sound like an underground hot spring with a gurgling sound.

Plus, at the end of August in the Arctic in the mornings there are already frosts, so steam also rises above these exits, so the picture was a little apocalyptic.

There was one more important nuance, because of which the pipe had to be stopped.

- Which one?

- We went into the winter, and in winter it is always more difficult to remove oil.

Although the swamps freeze, it is impossible to remove all pollution before the onset of spring, and in the spring with floods, when the snow begins to melt, we will have re-pollution of adjacent territories along with melt water, that is, oil will spread further and further.

- As I understand it, the management of Komineft, which operated the field and the oil pipeline, refused to stop pumping, and which, of course, did not want to re-drill new wells later.

But really, with such obvious and sad consequences, it was impossible to somehow influence this decision?

- Theoretically, it was possible to influence, but do not forget that we are talking about the mid-90s, when many Soviet standards were no longer in effect, and new ones had not yet been introduced, and in general the environmental legislation was weak.

And in a situation of limited financial capabilities, the same oil companies had no desire to stop the pipe and then start drilling all over again.

Apparently, they hoped for a Russian maybe.

Worn out pipeline

- Is it true that the danger of the destruction of this oil pipeline was warned for a long time and by the time of the emergency it was already in a very bad condition

and

?

- Yes, and it was well known for a long time.

I have documents according to which, since mid-1988, corrosion has been recorded on the lower part of the pipe during inspections.

The fact is that oil through this main pipeline went unprepared, along with formation waters, since water is heavier than oil, it came just from the bottom.

And this aggressive water slowly corroded the pipe and fistulas began to appear - through holes.

Small at first.

In October of the same year, experts made a conclusion on the pipe and a forecast calculation of the service life of this oil pipeline.

I also have these calculations on hand - the remaining maximum pipe service life was up to 20 months.

And the pipeline was operated until the end of 1994.

After the emergency, they wrote that

even during the construction of the pipeline in the mid-70s, they decided to save on cathodic protection, which gave additional resistance to corrosion, due to which, as a result, the calculated 20-year pipe service life turned out to be much less?

- I will not argue about cathodic protection, I don’t know such details, I was then engaged in cleaning up occasional pollution, in particular, since 1993, I worked at one of the first plants that processed oil sludge.

But, of course, before the pipes and their manufacturing technologies were different, they were not so wear-resistant.

Elimination of consequences

- Given the scope of your activity, you should have been actively involved in the elimination of the consequences of the spill.

How did it all happen?

- I was at the site of the emergency from the very beginning, I was engaged in cleaning.

But in December 1994 I was drafted into the army.

In winter, when the swamps were frozen, the filling of temporary dams and roads began in order to somehow localize the spill areas and be able to get to them.

But the beginning of the liquidation was very chaotic: there was no technology, knowledge and experience.

No one has ever come across such a scale.

At first, oil was simply burned out in very large volumes, which, of course, gave rise to re-pollution, already of the atmosphere.

Now this is an absolutely unacceptable measure, it is prohibited by law, but then it was the first thing that they began to do in order to somehow reduce these volumes.

Naturally, the employees of Komineft and other organizations were involved, but there were not enough people.

As a result, the worst thing happened - then it was not possible to protect water bodies from pollution.

There were no oil traps, water seals that we have now.

Silence and underreporting of volumes

- As I understand it, then our eternal, still Soviet problem manifested itself with the suppression of any negativity, and even the locals did not really know anything about what happened?

- Of course, there was no official information, they learned everything from people who returned to the city from the fields and talked about what was happening.

Well, when the oil got into the Kolva River through several streams and started sailing past the villages, then it got to Pechora, then the people living there felt the full scale of what had happened.

And in the spring, the flood spread the pollution, including through the flooded meadows, where the fodder base of livestock, the consequences were even more sad.

- To the question of the true picture.

Until now, there are very different figures for the amount of oil spilled from the pipe.

As I understand it, the official version of the commission investigating the causes of the accident, about 14 thousand tons, does not stand up to criticism and is greatly underestimated.

- Yes, various experts came to the conclusion that from 100 to 300 thousand tons flowed out.

I am leaning towards the upper level of 250-300 thousand tons.

We have already said that much was hiding, people still had this absolutely Soviet habit, so we tried to make the picture less scary by underestimating the volume of leakage.

After all, the greater the scale of the disaster, the greater the blow not only to the image of the company itself, but also to the international image of the state.

- At the end of May 2020, about 21 thousand tons of diesel fuel flowed out of the tank in Norilsk.

We all remember how huge the resonance was - society and the media, and the authorities literally stood on their ears for a long time, and even the coronavirus temporarily receded into the shadows.

It turns out that in 1994 the scale of the disaster was 10-15 more ...

- It turns out that way, only we must also take into account that oil has a much more harmful effect on nature than diesel fuel.

It contains heavy fractions, paraffins.

Under the influence of low temperatures, they settle to the bottom and it is almost impossible to clean the entire water body, heavy fractions remain there for many years.

Money and the state

And

what was the role of the

state

in eliminating the accident, how did it react then, how did it help?

- Of course, commissions were created, an investigation was started, but no money was allocated for the elimination of the consequences, you know what time it was.

They relied on the financial resources that Komineft had, but they were not enough.

It so happened that it was in August 94th that there was an active reform of the state authorities in the region, ministries began to appear instead of committees, including then the Ministry of Natural Resources of Komi arose and, naturally, under the guise of reorganization, they tried to remove unwanted ones, in particular my father.

They took them off because they worked actively, did not hush up the problem, raised uncomfortable questions, proposed measures to protect water bodies, which were quite costly, which no one then perceived.

- As far as I know, Russia even had to take a loan from the World Bank to eliminate the consequences.

That helped?

- Yes, our country was given a loan of about $ 100 million, they took it, in fact, at the insistence of the World Bank, because the world already understood that the scale of the catastrophe was international.

On the one hand, the loan helped to start full-scale and active work.

But a strict condition was set that Western companies should spend this money, which would be accountable to the creditor.

Oil got into the ocean through Kolva and Pechora.

Its current carried it to the west, there were excess oil products off the coast of Norway, so they sounded the alarm and began to involve international organizations.

Gigantic damage

- If we take the area of the epicenter of the spill, what were the consequences for local residents?

- At first, people had some confusion.

Spills have happened before, but not on this scale.

You need to imagine what it looked like - oil floated down the river with a layer of up to 6 cm. Due to the emergency, not only fishing suffered, but also the fodder base of livestock, underground waters were polluted, a blow was struck on migratory birds that nest in swamps, and fly to us birds from Africa, the Middle East, including the Red Data Book.

We also have the largest wetlands in the region throughout Europe.

Damage to water bodies alone amounted to 311 billion of those rubles.

And if we take into account that initially the volumes of the spill were greatly underestimated, then one can imagine that the real damage is ten times greater.

- Was the culprit of the accident, the Komineft company, somehow punished?

- In addition to recovering damages, the company was fined about $ 600 thousand. Criminal cases were opened, including against the company's management, among other things, for failure to take action.

Unfortunately, at that time there was no article in the Criminal Code for hiding information about such incidents, about a year ago we got it.

But those criminal cases did not find their ending, and the management of the company, along with the assets, soon left abroad, where they successfully lived.

- That is, no one was convicted for such an unprecedented oil spill?

- Yes, no one got the terms, everything was somehow released on the brakes.

- What happened to Komineft itself?

- They did not immediately, but went bankrupt and first entered the KomiTEK company, which in turn merged with Lukoil.

- Collecting such an amount of oil by hand was unrealistic and the process dragged on for years.

What technologies were used to clean the area?

- In December 1996, I returned from the army, by this period, together with the specialists of the Institute of Biology, there was already a project to clean up pollution by introducing microbiological preparations that caused the destruction of hydrocarbons.

These drugs were isolated from the local fauna, that is, these microbes live in the natural environment.

We isolated them from there, multiplied them in large quantities and then used them as a preparation in areas of contamination.

And such drugs are still being successfully used.

Therefore, by the summer of 1997, we had prepared normally, over the winter we produced this drug.

Well, when the snow melted, I already went there and worked on two sections.

- How was the cleaning process organized in general?

- All this oil spill was divided into sections, different companies worked in different sections and different technologies were tested.

Then we reclaimed two large areas using this technology.

And it showed its high efficiency - literally in two years nothing was left from the pollution.

And after three on this place there was already grass.

- What other technologies have been tested?

- There were trenches and dredging, these are technical methods.

There was direct collection of oil and mixing.

On this accident, in general, many different new technologies were invented and implemented in terms of oil recovery, processing of oil-contaminated soil, as well as oil localization and its removal on water.

New oil traps and hydraulic locks were introduced to contain this oil on the dam, allowing the bottom clean water to pass through.

- How did the fact that a few years later Lukoil came to the region and absorbed Komineft influenced the situation?

- Of course, it got better with funds for eliminating the consequences of the accident, because the late 90s were very difficult years in the history of the country.

As elsewhere, there were delays in wages, the commodity-money relations themselves were different, barter was used, checks issued by this or that enterprise, which could be purchased in a store, and so on.

People left en masse.

For example, my mother sold a two-room apartment in Usinsk in July 1999 for 19 thousand rubles - this is the price of two color TVs.

So much housing has depreciated.

But in September 1999, when Lukoil came and announced that it would actively invest in deposits and the city, the situation changed dramatically.

Money appeared in the city and housing prices skyrocketed, so we missed a bit.

Therefore, we can say that even before the arrival of this company, the work was going on, just not with such intensity and not in such volumes.

- When did you manage to finally eliminate all the consequences of the emergency?

- By about 2010.

By this time, no traces were left.

In 2015, I was in these contaminated areas, I often fly through these fields by helicopter and I can say that there are no traces of even those temporary roads laid after the spill.

By the way, I noticed long ago that the largest and tastiest cloudberry grows on the sites of old oil spills.

It smells slightly of hydrocarbons, but large.

Working on bugs

- Can we say that a catastrophe of this magnitude will not happen in Komi?

- I think you can.

The worn out pipelines change with good intensity.

Over the years, new diagnostic methods have appeared in terms of preventing such situations.

And the pipes themselves appeared in a polymer design that does not corrode.

Nevertheless, such accidents do happen.

In a year, we record 13-15 cases, which we have officially.

But if you understand that 60-70% are hiding anyway, then it is clear that there are more such cases.

But we also learned to react to them in a completely different way.

Emergency rescue teams appeared, new installations for the processing of oil sludge were introduced, and they learned how to dispose of it.

We learned how to react to accidents on the water.

Hydraulic structures have been built and maintained on streams and small rivers, which protect the Kolva River from pollution.

The main thing is that the region has built a clear system of measures in emergency situations when oil gets into the water.

- What is this system?

- This is a three-level river protection system.

This practice has been included in the system of best municipal practices in Russia as a technology to prevent pollution.

The first element of protection is the water locks on the streams.

If the oil has passed further, we use the second level - the system for capturing oil at the mouth of these streams.

But if oil does get into a big river, we have a five-stage boom system that prevents oil from going further.

- Just in mid-October, another oil pipeline accident caused a lot of noise, which formally took place in the neighboring Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO), but oil got into Kolva and, as I understand it, the main burden of elimination of the consequences fell mainly on your region.

- There was a leak from a pipe that had already been taken out of service.

After the oil got into the river (although the company promptly took protective measures, the river does not know the administrative boundaries), pollution still reached us.

Four boom lines have already been deployed on Kolva.

In an emergency, just in case, we deployed an additional fifth line to prevent the oil film from reaching populated areas.

Due to the fast current and cold weather, not all boundaries could withstand, so we had to figure out how to contain this film.

But in the end, all these efforts allowed us to keep the film.

"We need an emergency response plan for the entire Arctic"

- There is a lot of information about the incident in the media, there was a quick response from Moscow, and the officials were actively working - because of this accident and your employment, our interview had to be postponed several times.

Changes in approaches compared to 1994 are obvious, but have oil companies changed their approach to such emergencies?

- Sure.

The business began to form its own emergency reserve in sufficient quantity.

Now there are mandatory requirements for all companies that use oil or petroleum products, even for boiler houses, to have an oil spill response plan and corresponding contracts with emergency rescue teams.

The plan spells out who should act and how, and describes possible spill scenarios depending on the topography and weather conditions.

There is a general plan for the republic as a whole.

But I say at all forum sites that you need to have a plan for emergency spills in the Arctic as a whole, intersubjective, and not just for each individual region.

Because nature knows no administrative boundaries, the same river flows in different regions.

So that our colleagues in the same NAO understand how to act taking into account the fact that there are boundaries below.

And in order to know exactly where we have what forces and means, where we have protective structures, where, who and how long will be able to respond to an emergency.

Sooner or later we must come to this.

We also need the cooperation of commercial structures that operate, for example, on the same territory, but at different fields, they must have their own reserve of everything necessary in case of emergency.

- That is, consciousness has changed, and the oilmen are no longer trying to hush up the situation in the event of an emergency?

- Openness, as always, is not enough, but there are changes, companies have become more open, have learned to respond quickly, remove oil, reclaim contaminated soil, and use modern technologies.

We can say that they have become more environmentally responsible.

"Power not only controls, but also coordinates"

Now you can see that the authorities everywhere are particularly tough and fast reacting to such incidents.

- The work of government agencies, when compared with 1993, has undergone major changes.

Firstly, new laws, instructions, regulations and standards have appeared, and some of the adjustments were made precisely because of the accident in 1994.

Today, power structures, for example, my ministry, play both a controlling and coordinating role.

There is a clear system of penalties for such offenses in the form of imposing fines and calculating damage.

We have learned to be legally literate and defend our rights in courts, although it has always been the case that the legal services of commercial companies are stronger than those of the state.

Today, in our region, about 13 cases related to the pollution of forest lands with oil products are pending in the courts of the region, there are very serious sums.

I will not talk about specific companies and figures, but we are talking about billions of rubles.

What do you think about the responsibility for such incidents?
Does it need to be toughened, or are there enough existing sanctions that should simply be applied more effectively?

- I have always believed that responsibility for environmental crimes should be toughened.

This is primarily a crime against future generations.

It's not even a matter of "plantings", although there should be criminal liability.

A whole range of measures is needed.

It is necessary to increase fines and introduce the institution of environmental insurance, reserve or so-called liquidation funds should be created, where companies would regularly allocate some funds and from where, in which case, funds could be attracted to eliminate the consequences of an accident or urgent replacement of infrastructure ...

That is, we are not talking only about repressive measures, preventive measures are also needed.

“

Environmental insurance seems like a pretty sane idea.

- The issues of environmental insurance have been discussed for a long time, but so far they have not moved in any way.

There used to be a system of environmental funds, if I’m not mistaken, sometime before 2004, when fines for pollution and damage went to a special fund.

It was three-tier - municipal, regional and federal - and the money went there in a certain ratio.

These funds were used to carry out various environmental measures, including money from there were taken to eliminate the consequences of the emergency.

In Komi, we actively used this tool, we even liquidated various landfills at the expense of these funds.

But in connection with the adoption of the new budget code, this system disappeared.

I'm not afraid of resignation

- You have a rather tough position on environmental safety, you are suing the oil giants, and at the same time you have been working as a minister for a long time, since 2014 ...

- Over the years there were different situations, they tried to merge my ministry with the Ministry of Industry, I had to resign for some time.

I then immediately said that nothing would come of this idea, there is a direct conflict of interest, because their task is to develop industry in any way, and we have to supervise and control it.

In the end, he was right - a year later the governor canceled his decision.

I do not exclude the possibility that my next resignation may happen in the future, because not all representatives of big business really like my position, and we have a new governor.

I take it absolutely calmly, I'm not afraid of shocks - it's just work.

I have always said that I will not leave the republic anyway, I will just work in the industry in some other capacity.