Well you think something would have to get better somewhere right? Well unfortunately I have some more bad news. Currently there is a massive fuel leak that has contaminated two rivers near the Arctic city of Norilsk. There has been a warning put out to the city surrounding the rivers as their water supply is now almost completely comprimised.
21,000 tons of fuel has leaked into the rivers. The leak happened after a vehicle crashed into one of the containment receptacles for the diesel fuel at a local power plant. They suspect that the container first decompressed and then ruptured causing further oil to spill out. They did not report the incident at first and tried to handle it internally. It took several days for report of the incident to reach the authorities.
By the time the authorities were notified including Vladmir Putin over 100,000 sq meters of land had been affected. When he got the call he was reportedly very angry. Not only did the power plant try to deal with things themselves before alerting proper authorities but by doing that they may have caused more of an issue.
Campaign director at Greenpeace Russia Ivan Blokov said that this oil spill in comparison to others of great magnitude is “very very bad.” “We are talking about half the damage caused by the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989,” he said.
One thing that people have now been comparing the river to is the bad omen called The River of Blood. The first plague of the Egyptians in the book of Exodus was when water turned to blood. In the lore Aaron the spokesperson for Moses touched the “rod” of the Lord of the nile river. It immediately turned to blood, all the fish died, and the river stank.
Luckily this is not an actual “River of blood” but it is also very unfortunate that pollution of this magnitude is happening in the world right now. They are saying that it will cost several billion rubles to clean up the mess and the rivers will be unclean and unsafe for anything growing or living in it for possibly hundreds of years.
Source: Independent.UK
