MOSCOW – According to Russian officials and media reports, a burst pipeline in Siberia on Saturday led to a dramatic scene when partially refined oil caught fire on the ice of the frozen Ob River.
The spill occurred in the heartland of the Russian oil industry, the Khanty-Mansiysk region of Siberia, which is littered with wells and traversed by pipelines but sparsely populated. According to news reports, one person was injured.
A local environmental regulator, Svetlana Radionova, posted a statement and video online stating that an underwater pipeline had burst and that a fire had been discovered in the Ob River.
The video showed flames leaping into the air from what appears to be the center of the frozen Ob, one of the great Siberian rivers flowing from the south to the north in the Arctic Ocean.
Reports from the news agencies Tass and Interfax did not describe the extent of the spill, except that the size of the fire hole in the river ice was about a quarter acre.
Tass, a state news agency, quoted unnamed emergency response and industry officials as saying the pipeline contained a mixture of partially refined oil products, including propane and butane gas. The reports state that the pipeline also contains ‘light fractions’ of oil from a refinery, a description that may contain liquids that are more dangerous to the environment around a spill than gases such as propane.
The reports say the largest city is Nizhnevartovsk. They describe the offense in such a remote area that the nearest inhabited settlement was 44 km away. According to the Tass report, the pipeline has been shut down and attempts are being made to pump the contents out along its length so that it does not flow into the river.