The consequences of the recent environmental disaster in a Black Sea strait could take up to a decade to be eliminated, Greenpeace has said in a message to the Russian and Ukrainian premiers according to RIA Novosti.
A storm in the Black s Sea's Kerch Strait sank four ships and an oil tanker on November 11. At least six sailors died. The incident resulted in about 2,000 metric tons of fuel oil spilling into the sea.
"If oil products are not fully removed by early March 2008, the probability of a sharp deterioration in the environmental situation is high. Repeated and increasingly large-scale bird deaths cannot be ruled out," the document also says.
Russia's industrial safety watchdog said in late November that oil product concentrations in the Kerch Strait following the storm were 30 times higher than maximum permissible levels.
According to Alexei Kiselyov, coordinator of the environmental group's toxic substances division, the disaster "graphically demonstrated that coping with the aftermath of large oil spills in the sea is impossible today, so the main thing for us is to prevent a repetition of such incidents."
Kiselyov earlier said that fuel oil that had settled on the sea bed should be removed to prevent it from again washing up onto the coastline.
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