Leak in Siberian Oil Field Turns Into Massive Spill

Russian officials confirmed Tuesday that a massive oil leak, possibly outstripping the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, spread recently across northern Siberian bog land after aging pipelines ruptured and dikes holding back the escaped oil gave way under torrents of rain.

Fuel and Energy Ministry spokesmen claimed that the 24-square-mile spill in the Komi region was well under control and largely cleaned up, but top ecology officials flew off from Moscow to inspect the remote tundra, and Russian media accused the oil company involved, Komineft, of a giant cover-up.

“Somewhere between 14,000 and 60,000 tons of oil were spilled,” Ecology Ministry spokesman Alexander Shuvalov estimated. “While I wouldn’t term the accident a disaster at this point, I would certainly call this extraordinary and an emergency situation.”

The maximum Russian estimate of 60,000 tons would mean that about 18 million gallons of oil--far more than the 11 million released in the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989--leaked into a similarly fragile environment. Villagers are reporting films of oil coating parts of nearby swamps and rivers, but the region is so remote and the difficulty of measuring the leaked oil so great that no exact figure on its volume has yet been set.

Komineft claimed the total spill was less than 15,000 tons.

In Washington, Energy Department officials said they were formally notified by Russian leaders Tuesday afternoon that the spill amounted to about 13,700 tons of crude oil--about 40% of the Exxon Valdez spill--and would probably require U.S. emergency assistance. Deputy Energy Secretary Bill White told reporters that an unnamed U.S. company working in the area had estimated the spill at 20 times that size, or about 274,000 tons.

“It is a significant spill . . . , whether it’s 100,000 barrels or 2 million,” said White, who characterized the result as a “disaster” for an environmentally fragile region and for a Russian industry increasingly plagued by shoddy standards and unmet needs.

The U.S. firm working in the region told U.S. officials that the spill appeared to be six to seven miles long, about 13 yards wide and a yard deep. A film provided to the U.S. Energy Department by Russian sources indicates that at some point earlier this year, someone on the scene set fire to the spill. In the film, thick black clouds of smoke can be seen billowing from a solid lake of crude oil.

According to the Moscow newspaper Izvestia, the U.S. oil company Conoco, which works in an area nearby, sounded the alarm and Vice President Al Gore offered emergency ecological aid for the region.

“You get the impression that Russian agencies responsible for protecting the environment care more about their reputation in the eyes of the civilized world than the ecological safety of our territory,” Izvestia complained.

In fact, Russians may have been slow to react because such spills are extremely common in oil-rich regions of Siberia. Russian officials have estimated that 10% of Siberia’s oil production may be lost to spills and leaks, amounting to millions of tons a year of Russia’s best export.

White said that Washington on Tuesday offered to dispatch a U.S. team to Russia, including experts from the Environmental Protection Agency, Coast Guard, Interior Department and private firms specializing in the cleanup of oil spills. He said that Moscow had not yet responded to the offer.

Basically a giant swamp the size of Western Europe, the Siberian oil region is as crucial to Earth’s ecology as the rain forests of the Amazon, ecologists say. Russian oil extraction remains environmentally shoddy, from the rusting pipelines that carry the oil to the careless workers who often overfill pools of waste near oil wells.

Environmentalists contended that the Siberian spill could have been as great as 200,000 tons; Greenpeace activist Ivan Blokov said that the leak near the Komi town of Usinsk “is unique because it is the first of such scale.”

Blokov said that oil had been leaking through 23 holes in a 30-mile stretch of old pipeline from late August until early September. Other reports said serious leaks began as far back as February.

Workers built tall dikes to contain the escaped oil, Russian officials said, but the dikes were swept away by torrential rains Oct. 1. Millions of gallons of oil were released into two rivers that flow north into the Pechora River, which runs into the Barents Sea.

The Emergency Ministry claimed that a major containment and cleanup operation kept the Pechora from being badly affected by the spill, although spokeswoman Marina Ryklina said it did carry scattered spots of oil a yard or less in diameter.

But the two Pechora tributaries most damaged, the Kolva and Usa, carried a three-inch-thick film of oil on their surfaces, the Itar-Tass news agency said.

White emphasized that a cleanup operation in Arctic conditions would probably be extremely difficult and virtually without precedent. The Pechora is expected to freeze solid within two weeks, at which point the oil could migrate slowly beneath the ice and into the Barents Sea. Temperatures fall below 50 degrees below zero, halting outdoor work. And the kinds of equipment needed for the task do not exist in the remote Arctic region.

Officials said the polluted rivers have no villages on their banks, but Greenpeace reported that an oil slick between one and five yards wide runs near the village of Ust-Usa. Siberia’s oil-rich regions are home to many native peoples who survive by hunting and fishing. When a river dies, they must move on.

The salmon and shorebirds that use the Arctic Ocean’s sprawling network of wetlands, however, will have more difficulty moving out of the spill’s way. Those form the base of the food chain for the larger beasts that inhabit and migrate through the Arctic and its waters, according to the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation, an environmental watchdog group.

In the Exxon Valdez disaster, the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the tanker ran aground and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

Russian officials estimated the damage of the Usinsk spill at about $100 million.

Times staff writer Melissa Healy in Washington and Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.