ST. PETERSBURG, June 27. /TASS/. Regions along the Northern Sea Route must be legally responsible for organization of rescue operations, the Nenets Autonomous Region’s Governor Yury Bezdudnyi said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
This initiative requires financing from the federal budget, the official added.
The Northern Sea Route crosses the Arctic Ocean seas and serves Arctic ports and river ports in Siberia. In the Nenets Autonomous Region, rescue and evacuation of people from vessels in the open sea is the responsibility of the search and rescue service, the local civil aviation crews and the regional hospital’s emergency department. Naryan-Mar (the region’s center), to where the rescued are brought, is in the Pechora’s lower reaches, some 110 kilometers from the Barents Sea.
"Historically, we have been rescuing people, but in reality, in fact, we are not related to the sea route," the governor said at a session on safety in the Arctic. "Rescuers must be working from Dudinka, or westbound. But we are closer, and we realize we live in one country, and regardless of what ship are sailing, of which country, we will rescue people anyway."
"The question however remains how to fix it legally, and not only legally," he continued. "I don’t want to sound greedy, but we need to have it fixed financially, since rescue operations are rather expensive, and my colleagues will agree, since we all have been facing incidents."
The Arctic coastline is about 1,000 kilometers long. The governor stressed the region needs amphibious rescue helicopters, thermal imagers and other equipment. "We realize that on the Northern Sea Route most often are not our local residents. But they are residents of Russia, sailors! We must rescue them 24/7, 365 days a year," the governor told reporters. "We hope for the support of the federal authorities in supplying amphibious helicopters to our region."
Cooperation between authorities
During the session, Minister for Development of the Far East and Arctic Alexey Chekunov highlighted the problem of unstructured responsibilities of various authorities in prevention and response to emergency situations. "Whenever something happens, a person knows - the emergencies service must come and rescue," the minister said. "In reality, there are responsibilities of five or seven authorities - the forestry, the rescue at sea, Roshydromet, the region, the military, the national reserve."
"I can remember when Vladivostok got frozen, we had to cut open the national reserve’s warehouses as we could not find a responsible official, to take diesel generators from there," he said. "At that very time, the emergencies ministry was delivering them from Moscow on (Ilyushin) Il-76."
The Russian government has been adjusting the Arctic zone’s development strategy in terms of safety and rescue operations along the Northern Sea Route, the minister continued. "This country plans $100 billion revenues from the Northern Sea Route," he added. "[What will be] if we do not organize a sufficient emergency and rescue system, what if we are unable to response promptly to an emergency situation?"
Additionally, the national program for the Far East’s social and economic development will have a chapter on emergency situation prevention and response.
Work with big businesses in Arctic Zone
Big companies also participate in safety organization processes in the Arctic. The Norilsk Nickel Company’s Vice President on federal and regional programs Andrey Grachev pointed to the importance of interaction between various services in emergency situations. "The emergency situations ministry, the sea rescue service, our company’s rescuers. Due to their efforts, we have managed to collect 25,000m3 of the fuel-water mixture, petroleum products and to cleanup about 35,000m2 of the coastline," he said about the accident in Norilsk, where in May, 2020, a fuel tank failed releasing 20,000 tonnes of petroleum products.
Presently, the company’s unified dispatch service receives all the data on monitoring of building and structures. "We nowadays control 165 buildings in Norilsk, and next year (2023) we will install sensors on 55 facilities of the Norilsk Fuel and Energy Company, and five tailors will be also equipped with such sensors," he added.
The work to prevent emergency situations requires complex scientific approaches, he continued. "Over recent two years, we have organized two big expeditions, which involved the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences," he said. "One of the tasks the scientists were facing was to study the perennially frozen soils, since one of the realistic versions of that accident is that the well-known tank’s base had subsided." The expeditions featured dozens scientists from 30 research institutes.
About forum
The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum organized by the Roscongress Foundation took place on June 15 through to 18. In 2022, the forum was dubbed: ‘New Opportunities in a New World’. A number of other events took place beyond the business program. Among them were the SME Forum, the Creative Business Forum, the Drug Security Forum, the SPIEF Junior Dialogue, and SPIEF Sport Week. TASS was the event’s official photo hosting agency and information partner.