MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/. Volunteers of the Clean Arctic federal project found in a bay near Yakutia's Tiksi an abandoned vessel, the Dnepr, from which spent fuel and lubricants flow into the Laptev Sea, threatening the local ecosystem, the project's press service told TASS.
"Any delay with processing of the vessel would mean a true threat and ecology damage not only to the neighboring waters, but to the entire ecosystem in the Laptev Sea," the press service quoted a member of the project's federal headquarters Andrey Nagibin as saying. "Further on, those oil products may flow into the Arctic Ocean."
The volunteers have noticed a crack in the ship's hull and oily streaks on the water surface near it.
The Dnepr has been moored in the bay since the USSR times. Since the 1970s, the vessel had been used during navigation as a container for collected waste oil and other fuels and lubricants from incoming ships. In winter, the collected fuel was burned to heat the village. Nowadays, Tiksi's population is more than 4,500 people.
Clean Arctic is a large-scale project to clean the Arctic territory from the waste, accumulated since the Soviet times. Captain of the 50 Let Pobedy nuclear-powered Arctic class icebreaker Dmitry Lobusov and Gennady Antokhin, Captain on FESCO’s ships from 1982 to 2012, are the project’s authors. Clean Arctic has developed into a platform, which unites public and volunteer organizations, scientists, officials and businesses. In 2021, the project's volunteers collected more than 1,500 tons of waste for further processing. The second season kicked off on May 28 in the Murmansk Region. Clean Arctic has planned more than 30 expeditions to all Arctic districts before winter.