On 15 December 2024, two oil tankers — Volgoneft-212 and Volgoneft-239 — were involved in an accident in the Kerch Strait during a storm, and three thousand tons of oil was spilled into the waters of the strait. A day later, the oil washed up on the shores of Krasnodar Territory. Dozens of kilometers of the Black Sea coast were contaminated with mazut (fuel oil), and fish, birds and dolphins were poisoned and died. Environmentalists have already pronounced the incident a major catastrophe. Local residents, without waiting for marching orders from the authorities, started cleaning up the fuel oil and saving birds and animals from day one. Thousands of people have been going out daily to clean the coastline. Every one of them has their own motivations and their own story connected with the sea.
“We have to do something!”: Marina, Nastya, and the Captain on Jamaica Beach
“It’s really black now! Our poor sea! What have they done to you?!”
Marina leans over a huge jellyfish stuck in an island of oil, and from the way her shoulders are shaking, I can guess that she is crying. Then she pulls back her mask and inhales a breath of the oil vapor-infused cloud. She wipes her tears away and says that she and her husband moved here from Belgorod a few years ago for a quiet life on the warm coast. Before the accident, her heart ached only for her relatives living back home amid the shelling. What is happening here now makes her heart ache as well.
“A friend from Tuapse wrote, ‘Will you put me up? Can I come there to help you too?'” Marina smiles sadly. “They’ve been coming from all over Russia, and many people are hosting the volunteers for free. Many people are feeding them. This is normal.”
The sun sinking into the sea at her back, Marina looks like the heroine of an apocalypse movie — alone, in a protective suit, on a islet of sand surrounded by huge black stains.
They’re black oil slicks. It’s best not to step in them: they will ruin any kind of footwear. But it is impossible not to step into them, because although earlier, when the weather was colder, the fuel oil froze, now, with the temperature at +12 ℃, it has begun to flow. People armed with shovels are trying to dispose of these spreading stains by bagging them as soon as possible. As will transpire later, plastic bags cannot be used for this job: the fuel oil eats through the plastic and leaks back out. You need special bags — and you need special clothes, respirators, and goggles. They are clumsy to work in, so many people can’t stand it and clean the shore in their street clothes. They regret it later: by the evening their head starts to ache, and when they exhale, it smells like they have a petrol station inside them.
Continue reading “The Black Black Sea”