Photo of the Selendang Ayu crash. Photo by US Coast Guard.

Liubov is right in her comment to my post about the oil spill in San Francisco Bay.  News reports say about 15% of the oil has been recovered, but I’m not sure that’s the whole story.  Once oil is in the water, it will often emulsify – mixing with water into an oily, liquidy goop.  Essentially, it expands – so even though they’ve recovered 15% of the total, that 15% may include both oil and water.  Historically, although the oil companies don’t like to advertise this, there is a very low recovery rate for cleanup of oil after spills.

The catastrophe Liubov mentions in Kerch Strait, between the Black Sea and Azov Sea, is devastating.  Several ships, including an oil tanker, went down in a very severe storm.  Some of our Russian partners have been following this accident since it happened over the weekend.  And yes, the damage from the Volganeft-139 – the ship that went down in Kerch Strait – could be even greater, as it was carrying much more oil.  We’ve heard that the spill could be as much as 2,000 metric tonnes – far greater than the amount spilled from the Cosco Busan in San Francisco Bay.

From what we’ve heard, the Volganeft-139 was a ship built to transport oil up rivers.  That means it’s a lighter boat, without a deep draft like ocean-going boats.  The oil is transferred from an ocean-going boat to the river boat before it heads up river (or vice-versa, depending on the direction).  As a river boat, the Volganeft-139 simply was not built to ride out a storm in an ocean with 18-foot waves.  So one has to ask:  was this accident preventable?  Should the Volganeft-139 have been in Kerch Strait at all, or once it new the storm was coming, could it have sheltered in an area that would not have been hit with such fierce conditions?

Lots of investigations will start happening both with the Cosco Busan in San Francisco and the Volganeft-139.  Both are tragedies whose impacts will be felt for many years to come.  We’re putting together recommendations as part of our shipping safety work here in the States, and some of our Russian colleagues are doing the same for the Russian government.  Let’s hope we can learn from these mistakes to help prevent such accidents in the future.