An environmental group called the damage "catastrophic" and the concentration of contaminants in neighboring waters has already exceeded tens of thousands of times the authorized levels, according to the Russian environmental agency Rosprirodnadzor.
Plant workers originally attempted to contain the spill by themselves and did not report the incident to emergency services for two days, said Minister of Emergency Situations Evgeny Zinichev at a meeting on Wednesday chaired by Putin and broadcast on national television.
"So what, are we going to learn about emergencies from social media now? Are you okay over there?" Putin said, berating the governor of Krasnoyarsk, Alexander Uss and leaders of the Norilsk-Taimyr Energy Company, which operates the station, for a delayed response after local authorities were informed of the spill on social media.
The commission of inquiry, the main Russian law enforcement agency, said on Tuesday that a criminal investigation had been launched into 20,000 tonnes of diesel fuel spilled in a Norilsk river following a "decompression unexplained "from a storage tank.
Thawing permafrost?
Nornickel, the parent of the energy company, said that the foundations of the storage tank may have sunk due to the melting of permafrost, highlighting the increasingly hot dangers of temperatures for infrastructure and ecosystems. the Arctic, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.
"Right now, we can assume ... that due to the unusually mild summer temperatures in recent years, the permafrost may have melted and the pillars under the platform could have sunk," said the director of operations of Nornickel, Sergey Dyachenko, according to TASS. Press Agency.
North Asia, especially above the Arctic Circle in Siberia, has so far experienced the highest normal temperatures on the planet in 2020. During the first four months of the year, the region experienced temperatures more than 4 degrees Celsius higher than normal on average.
The Arctic region is warming, on average, twice as fast as the rest of the planet, due to global warming, scientists say.
Local authorities have stated that the spill could take weeks to start clean-up as the region lacks expertise in using such amounts of fuel, the river is not navigable and there are no roads that surround him. Other expert groups are deployed to other regions after the state of emergency.
"The incident had catastrophic consequences and we will see its repercussions in the years to come," said Sergey Verkhovets, Arctic projects coordinator for the Russian WWF branch, in a statement. "We are talking about dead fish, polluted plumage of poisoned birds and animals."
