Our Executive Director is a real stick-in-the-mud

Sakhalin Island, Russia – Today I had the opportunity to accompany our partners at Sakhalin Environment Watch on one of their trips to inspect pipeline construction for the Sakhalin-II project, which is being led by Gazprom and Shell.  What I saw was shocking – even to me, and I’ve seen a lot of pretty bad places!  Despite an enormous amount of public concern about how the pipeline will affect salmon streams, pressure from international banks to clean up the river crossings, and a huge crackdown by the Russian government on the project’s environmental violations, the pipeline is just causing more and more damage.

We visited a slope that was a focus of the government crackdown against Shell last year.  And it’s now looking even worse.  You can see a hole forming in the middle of the slope from erosion – erosion that’s all going downstream into salmon spawning rivers.  Those are our partners Dmitry Lisitsyn and Zhenya Konovalov at Sakhalin Environment Watch that you can see in the photos.  

They think the problems with the pipeline are because Shell failed to complete a good project design.  Shell clearly still isn’t doing enough – it isn’t planting the slope, for example, which would increase slope stability.  But the problems will continue to get worse – they picked a bad route in mountainous conditions with very poor soils prone to erosion.  Following the construction, it’s even more likely that after strong rainstorms (as we’ve had the last couple of days) we will see landslides and debris flows that could destroy sections of the pipeline.  One geologist told us today, “I pray that the pipeline will be destroyed in a landslide before they put oil into it.  Because once they put oil into the pipeline, and the landslide happens, it will be much worse.” 

Our inspection of the pipeline had its own adventures. We’d had a lot of rain in the last day, which made the roads bad and the mud worse.  At one point, as I was trying to get close to a severely eroded area on the pipeline route, I stepped into some mud and sank up to my knees!  It just goes to show how bad the conditions are in Sakhalin – and clearly the conditions are too difficult for the engineers at Shell.