Ministry of Transport and Rosprirodnadzor consider how to raise sunken tankers from the bottom of the Kerch Strait

Scientists, together with specialists from the Ministry of Transport, are developing a method for raising parts of the two Volgoneft tankers from the bottom of the Kerch Strait, which crashed in mid-December due to difficult weather conditions. During this time, the vessels of the FGBU "Morspassluzhba" examined 809.8 sq. km of water area, cleaned 35.5 thousand sq. m. Specialists continue to conduct round-the-clock environmental monitoring of the sea surface.

The volume of oil products that entered the sea is already about 2.4 thousand tons, and the main thing when lifting them to the surface is to prevent new leaks. According to the press service of the Ministry of Transport, despite the storm and low visibility under water, divers of the Morspassluzhba completed an inspection of the sunken fragments of tankers at a depth of 17-23 meters. They seal possible places of damage to the tanks.

The complexity of the task is that the disaster in the Kerch Strait is practically the first in the world where M100 fuel oil spill occurred: this fuel is not amenable to traditional cleaning methods.

M100 fuel oil freezes at a temperature of +25℃, has almost the same density as water and is denser, and when it gets into the water, it does not float to the surface, but goes to the bottom or floats in the water column. There are no proven technologies in the world for its removal from waters, so the main way to eliminate the consequences of the disaster is to collect it from the coastline when fuel oil is thrown into the coastal zone.

Read materials on the topic:

Morspassluzhba did not detect fuel oil leaks from the sunken Volgoneft tankers

Fuel oil spill in the Black Sea after the tanker crash: the prosecutor's office is monitoring the situation