Norilsk oil spill

, 1964) Diesel oil is used as a backup fuel for the Norilsk-Taimyr Energy coal-fired combined heat and power plant. Fuel storage Tank 5 failed due to holes at the tank bottom, caused by the formation of ulcerative corrosion. In 2014, the company had been ordered by the Russian regulatory agency for natural resources Rostekhnadzor to, by 2015, clean the outer surface of the walls and roof of the tanks from rust and restore the anticorrosion coating, and by October 2016, to conduct non-destructive inspection of the tank bottoms. Despite these requests from the Russian Government, Norilsk-Taimyr Energy did not take the requested steps to avoid a failure of Tank 5. ==Spread and clean-up==

Up to 21,000 cubic metres (17,500 tonnes) of diesel oil spilled on to the ground and into local rivers, On 4 June 2020 Russian state television reported that the spill had been contained using a series of specially constructed booms on the Ambarnaya river. However, drifting ice broke the booms which flows into the Arctic Ocean. ==Aftermath==

Russia's Investigative Committee launched a criminal investigation of the spill. The head of the power plant's boiler-turbine workshop was placed in pretrial detention, charged with violating environmental regulations and negligence. Yevgeny Zinichev, head of Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry, stated that the power plant did not report the incident for two days, while trying to contain the situation on their own. President Vladimir Putin declared a regional state of emergency following the spill, and criticized the local authorities for a slow response. Putin ordered officials to amend Russian law to prevent similar accidents in the future. In a 3 June 2020 televised meeting devoted to disaster management, Putin asked Sergei Lipin, the head of NTEK: "Why did government agencies only find out about this two days after the fact? Are we going to learn about emergency situations from social media?" After the state environmental agency Rosprirodnadzor told its employee Vasily Ryabinin to stop investigating the disaster, he quit his job on 7 June and went public as a whistleblower. In the aftermath of the Norilsk spill, Russia's Prosecutor General's office ordered safety checks at all dangerous installations built on the permafrost in Russia's Arctic. Greenpeace Russia compared the potential environmental effects of the Norilsk spill to that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In June 2020, Rosprirodnadzor asked Norilsk to pay 148 billion rubles to cover damage caused by the massive spill, but Norilsk disagreed with the value. ==See also==