In May, a diesel leak in a power plant threatened the Russian Arctic ecosystem. Now environmentalists have identified further pollution. The accused corporation Nornickel hinders the investigation.
By Ina Ruck, ARD Studio Moscow
He doesn’t want his name published, he says on the phone. And certainly not to be associated with the video – he didn’t want to lose his job. He’s a worker in Norilsk, Russia, and he’s been working for a month to fix the aftermath of an oil spill.
He anonymously sent a video to an opposition politician that has long gone viral. He digs a hole in the middle of the tundra, a brown liquid gathers in it. “Pure diesel,” you hear him say. “I could fill up the ground here now.” To prove it, he tipped the broth into a small fire and flames shot up immediately.
The public prosecutor’s office is investigating
At the end of May, 21,000 tons of diesel fuel had leaked from a power station tank: into the surrounding rivers, into the ground, into a large lake. The power plant belongs to Nornickel, the second largest nickel producer in the world. A catastrophe for the sensitive ecosystem of the Russian Arctic.
Thawing permafrost is to blame, that’s why the tank burst, it was said in the group – but it has long been suspected that it saved on maintenance. Russia’s prosecutor’s office found.
Since then, the cleanup has been ongoing in the Arctic. The company organizes these itself. More than 90 percent of the diesel has been contained, he said recently. This is not verifiable because independent control is hardly possible. Because of Corona, the area is quarantined and journalists have difficulty accessing it.
Oligarch and Putin friend
In any case, it is not easy to research in Norilsk about Nornickel: the group dominates the region and is by far the largest employer. And the most important thing: his boss, oligarch Vladimir Potanin, gets along brilliantly with President Vladimir Putin.
Elena Kostyutschenko, a reporter for the Moscow newspaper “Novaya Gazeta”, made it into the affected area together with environmentalists from Greenpeace. They took soil and water samples and spoke to the people of the region. And they came across a completely different track: The diesel leak was not the only problem, the people told the reporter: The company has been directing heavy metal-containing waste water directly into nature for some time.
In fact, the journalist found a pumping station at one of the sewage basins – and two large pipes that lead from the basin into the tundra. “When we saw that they were simply pumping the poisonous water from the pool through the pipes into nature, we immediately filmed it and posted the pictures. Then we called the police and the environmental agency,” said Kostyutschenko.
Does Nornickel want to remove evidence?
But the plant security appeared before the police. Kostyuchenko’s video shows how men want to prevent them from filming. And then how big bulldozers move up and quickly pull the pipes out of the water. It seems like you want to remove evidence.
Nornickel later stated that pumping wastewater into nature was only a one-off operation. The pool was shortly before overflowing, so it was pumped out. “This allowed a gross violation of the rules,” said the group’s press office. “The people responsible have already been released from their positions.”
Environmentalist Elena Sakirko, who discovered the pump system together with Kostyutschenko, does not believe a word. Not only because the pipes and pumping station would have looked like a permanent installation: “At the point where the wastewater was drained into the forest, there are dead trees, some yellow-orange in color. Nothing grows anymore. And deeper in the forest we found several large, foul-smelling pools. It’s not the first time. “
You still can not believe how cynical the company is with the environment: “They tell the whole world how quickly they can eliminate the consequences of the diesel leak and dump environmental poison elsewhere in exactly the same nature.”
Nothing goes past the group
Her Moscow Greenpeace colleague Vladimir Tschuprow believes that the controls are far too lax: “The head of the Russian environmental authority said today that water had to be drained from the reservoir to prevent major damage”. So you defend the approach. “I suspect that authorities have always known and tolerated it because Nornickel is important to the region.”
So important that nothing seems to be going on in the region without the blessing of the group. When the environmentalists want to take their soil samples to Moscow by plane so that they can be examined by an independent laboratory, they are stopped at Norilsk airport: Nornickel did not allow the samples to be exported from the city.
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