14 DAY TRIAL // About a week and a half ago, an accidental spill sent significant amounts of oil floating down Russia's Kolva River.
Despite the fact that oil is now starting to accumulate on the river's banks and has even reached the Pechora River, whose waters flow into the Arctic Ocean, the company responsible for this incident seems to have forgotten that it is supposed to clean up this mess.
Or at least talk to local people and let them know what has actually happened and what they should do to keep both themselves and their families safe.
“For a week now the oil has been coating the river and building up on the banks, with no reaction from Rusvietpetro, the joint venture company of VietPetro and Zarubezhneft, a state-controlled Russian oil company, and no cleanup being organised by the company or even the local authorities.”
“There has not been a word to the communities about how they will clean up the spill, not a word to their investors that the spill is even happening, and almost zero coverage by local and national media,” Greenpeace writes on its official website.
The organization says that, after being left to deal with this oil spill as best as they could, people living in this part of Russia first tried contacting local authorities.
They hoped that the latter would be able to provide them with some answers. When this endeavor proved futile, they took it to themselves to clean up the spill.
Judging by how much oil has been collected up until now and how much remains to be removed from these natural ecosystems in the days to come, members of Greenpeace Russia and the people working with them suspect that roughly 100 tonnes of oil made their way into the Kolva River when the spill occurred.
Greenpeace maintains that this accidental oil spill is further proof that oil companies should not be allowed to drill in the Arctic.
“If Rusvietpetro and the Russian authorities can’t deal with or don’t wish to deal with even this comparatively small accident on shore, it’s scary to imagine how they will deal with an accident in the Russian Arctic, hundreds of miles away from civilization and in dangerous conditions of ice and Arctic storms,” these greenheads say.