Volunteers struggled on Friday to shovel up tons of sticky oil from Russia’s Black Sea coastline following what President Vladimir Putin has called an ecological disaster.
The oil spilled from two ageing Russian oil tankers that were severely damaged by a weekend storm in the Kerch Strait that separates southern Russia from Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014. One of the vessels split in half, and a crew member was killed, while the other ran aground.
At the sea’s edge, volunteers shoveled oil and blackened sand into white sacks to be taken away in trucks, as more viscous black tar drifted in on the waves.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. I can’t even really imagine it. It seems to me that nature will be affected for many decades to come,” said one of the volunteers, a woman who gave her first name as Tatiana.
“Even when you remove the top layer of sand, then you step on it and fall through, because there is still fuel oil under the sand.”
Volunteers have set up a rescue center for stricken sea birds such as cormorants, which flapped their wings in distress as oil was wiped from their plumage and syringes were used to feed them. The head of the center, Evgeniy Vitishko, said some 500 birds had been treated, but more than 30 had…