Eco disaster at Kamchatka peninsula with mass death of sea animals | Hacker News Reader

Eco disaster at Kamchatka peninsula with mass death of sea animals

siberiantimes.com

286 pointsignasl58 comments

There's Kozelsky pesticides landfill in the area. It was started there circa 1980, 35 km to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. There were 108 tons of unusable pesticides. The spill comes from the river Nalycheva, and the landfill is on the river Mutnushka which flows into the Nalycheva river.

Very interesting. It is mentioned here:

"Regionally Based Assessment of Persistent Toxic Substances: Central and Northeast Asia Regional Report"

United Nations Environment Programme, December 2002

https://iwlearn.net/resolveuid/1946c1f28aed08b804427301ae5e0...

Kamchatka Oblast - Pesticide landfill built in 1979-1982 at foot of Kozelsky volcano. 102 t of various pesticides.

...

In the Central and North East Asia Region, the former Soviet Union has major hot spots for obsolete pesticides. A meeting held in Moscow on 7-8 February, 2001 by the Arctic Council for “The ecological reasonable management in field of stores of out-of-date pesticides“ project have identified priority Regions whereby the inventory of out-of-date pesticides should be documented. These Regions are the Kamchatka Peninsula, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Magadan Oblast, Sakha Republic (Yakutia) and Tyumen Oblast of the Russian Federation. Furthermore, inventory for out-of-date pesticides in three sub-boreal Regions have been identified: Altai Krai, Kurgan and Omsk Oblast (Shekhovtsov, 2002). Members of the Commonwealth of Independent States have a large quantity of PTS which are obsolete and redundant. A conservative estimate suggests there is greater than 150000 t of obsolete pesticides. Much is in poor condition and not properly managed (PAN UK, 2000).

> ecological reasonable management in field of stores of out-of-date pesticides

The "reasonable" rubs me the wrong way. Not "safe", not "holistic", but "reasonable". As in something that doesn't put a noticable dent in some bottom line.

"After nearly two decades, Kamchatka recorded a net natural population growth instead of decline in 2007. However, in first half of 2008, the trend was reversed and population decline was observed again, partly due to an increased mortality rate among the rural population."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka_Krai

A person might start to wonder whether massive planetary poisoning is part of some plan ... a useful 'side-effect'.

From https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/332810-behind-ecological-disa...:

According to local media, there have already been leaks from buried pesticides. Regional agronomist Anatoly Fedorchenko said in 2006 that “this amount [20 tons of arsenic] is enough to poison the entire northern Pacific Ocean.” Although the landfill was mothballed in 2010, additional checks are now due to be carried out.

I tried to generate a "story" using Planet imagery: https://www.planet.com/stories/kamtchatka-eco-disaster-4zV9_... The imagery from May 22 seems especially suspicious. Unfortunately there are some large gaps of images available (at least to me!)

edit: apparently I had too many filters on. Here's one with slightly more imagery: https://www.planet.com/stories/more-kamchatka-eco-disater-fr...

A few thoughts: seems to coincide with snowmelt... could be anything in the catchment area. Also, this is a volanic region so there's some possibility that there is some natural deposition of sulfuric acid. The latter also makes for great plausible deniability of course...

Looks like that military base dumped something yellow and very toxic into the river (or some other organization, but we only hear of the military base being in the area).

I wonder what kind of chemicals fit that profile?

It's nice to live in a country where doing that means lawsuits and jail time usually. I doubt there will be justice in this case.

Just mud can have the same effect. In any case the effect on eyes and the smell would discard a mud flood (probably).

You don't need a toxic to kill lots of animals.

What country do you live in? In mine, the good ol' USA, captured regulators just make it all legal. See fracking, for example.

Yet the waterways in the USA have never been cleaner in the last hundred years. There are regulations and they are enforced, imperfectly like everything.

I live in Canada where we take the environment more seriously still.

There's very little left in the US as ugly as the Athabaska oil sands.

Not a competition, really; we've both got to do better.

There was an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center that was just giant satellite photos of the oil sands region. It looked downright apocalyptic.

By exporting a lot of industry, we pollute more, just other people's water.

Yes, this is true. In countries like China or Vietnam with lax environmental controls.

“The last hundred years” is an interesting frame of reference; why not use the last five hundred, or two thousand?

Hardly anything is cleaner post industrial revolution. Not only are there more people but we use more resources per person and produce more waste products. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

There are exceptions though, sewers and sewage treatment have been a great invention. And big cities aren't drowning in horse shit which was a major issue in London and New York at the turn of the twentieth century.

Because wretched nigh on universal poverty, above 50% infant mortality, famine every 20 years killing perhaps a quarter of the pain, endless toil, all these things are bad. Given the choice between living like the average peasant in 1800 and maintaining something like our current first world standard of living and health while so destroying the environment that the first planet we need to terraform is Earth people will choose the latter. Most of the world’s population was peasants in 1900. No one had antibiotics. Air conditioning was practically unknown.

The state of nature is hellish and people will absolutely pave everything while breathing air that tastes like an ashtray to avoid it.

I would like to see documentation of the state of US waters. Air quality, for example, has been worsening recently:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/10/25/study-finds-deterioratio...

And the water quality is not far behind, as it seems like every month has some new repeal of protections in order to benefit a few cronies of the current regime at the expense of national interests. For example:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/12/10/coal-mine-next-door/ho...

Exceptions don't make the rule though. There has been lots of information on the results of the clean water act. One example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181009115102.h...

I have no doubt that the Clean Water Act has been super effective at cleaning up water. I do think that environmental protections have been significantly damaged, and that if we do not yet see those effects on water, like we currently do for air, then it's likely that water quality will soon decline.

There was a huge change in the 70s, but those changes are currently being rolled back.

It’s legal to dump industrial diesel into rivers in the USA?

Look into the Superfund sites in the US of A. Most of the things done in the 80s are now being cleaned up by the federal government at taxpayer's expense. (It's not uncommon to re-clean the sites that have already been cleaned before, either.) Were any CEOs of any of those companies brought to justice for the environmental pollution they have produced?!

Many of them are out of business.

Others weren't breaking the law. That's actually pretty important: our legal system doesn't allow us to seek justice for criminal behavior which wasn't criminal at the time, and mostly that's a good thing.

That's what Superfund is all about, really. Companies have been fined and sued into bankruptcy for breaking regulations that actually existed, though by no means all of the ones that deserved it.

A LOT of those superfund sites were government sites, mostly military bases. And those sites were grossly polluted before significant environmental regulations went into place.

Look at the notorious Love Canal. The company got permission to dump toxic waste into a pit. And after Occidental bought the company, they were required to pay for the clean up.

May not be legal, but the current administration in charge of enforcing environmental laws doesn't seem very interested in doing so.

Yes, it's sad. It's a possible argument against old leaders - they're likely to be less forward thinking than someone with more life left. Plus people of that generation care a lot less about the environment.

It's obviously also a consequence of the short term focus of having fixed term limits.

I don't know how to fix these things, but it's irritating that nobody even tries to fix it.

It's not just the leaders. There's a large body of voters in both the US and Canada who are strongly in favor of coal, oil and gas and vehemently opposed to any limits being placed on those companies

And the shit that goes down in Canada is incredible. Trudeau. Young liberal, right? Ran on an anti-pipeline platform, but when he took office, he bought the pipeline for $7B and fully indents to build it.

I think I'm in favor of the pipeline, the alternative is shipping oil via rail which is riskier and burns more oil. Sadly it doesn't stay in the ground without a pipeline.

However, Canada should get smart here and do what Norway does with their oil profits. Invest it in a sovereign wealth fund that's diversified away from oil. Because the oil age is ending and it will hit the most expensive producers, like the oil sands the hardest.

That seven billion spent on converting to renewable energy might have made more sense.

Agree with your comments regarding Norway and renewable energy.

However, I suspect that if the pipeline is built they will still ship via rail if it is profitable - thus the net effect will just be more oil coming from the oil sands.

The only scenario were a pipeline could help the environment (relative to the status quo - it's still bad) would be it rail usage was displaced by pipeline usage. This could be true only when the price of oil holds stable between a narrow range such that pipeline shipments profitable, but not rail shipments. The price is unlikely to ever hold at such a range long enough such that Suncor, etcf.. would adjust production to ship by pipeline only. High sunk capital costs have meant that historically these companies run close to full capacity regardless of price.

That's an interesting take on the pipeline. If market demand for heavy oil and oil sands supply are unlimited, then it would indeed function like that. Both are finite though. It's a possibility, I just don't have the information to say which would be the more likely outcome.

There's little doubt the pipeline is what's best for Canada. What's best for humanity is another question.

“ This could be true only when the price of oil holds stable between a narrow range such that pipeline shipments profitable, but not rail shipments.”

Are you saying this because you know it to be true, or are you speculating?

Of course not, but the OP thinks if it doesn’t pop up on his Twitter feed, there must be no enforcement.

https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/criminal-investigations

After regulations have been relaxed recently, I wouldn't be surprised.

I 've also noticed that satellite imagery (Google Maps and Google Earth) have been blanked off for large areas of the relevant district of Kamchatka coast.. never seen that before except in and around the vicinity of top secret military bases. I don't buy the Russian authorities insistence that it's an oil spill, I've worked many oil spills and see no sign, in the Kamchatka images i've accessed, of any oil pollution. I had already come to the conclusion that it must be chemical and the info shared on this site has hardened that view, you get a lot of pheonols in "cides" and often various forms/types of hydrocarbons are involved in the "carriers" for cides. Like others on this site, I'd already fixed on the river and followed it's course up into the highlands where I'd deduce, from the mapping of Siberian wildfires, that there's been a lot of wildfire over recent years. This would generate major loss of tree cover, which in turn (in the evnt of heavy rainfall or snow melt) would lead to major erosion and infrastructure damage.. including the destruction of bunded or buried chemical waste repositories and subsequent leaks... would be great to know if any one's doing autopsy on dead marine life or has attempted sampling and analysis on the water.

related: there was another large poison spill in russia this year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norilsk_oil_spill

Norilsk is over 3500 km from Kamchatka.

Probably why the commenter said there was another oil spill in Russia.

Probably but 'both are in Russia' is fairly poor relatedness. Norilsk is a mining center and one of the most polluted places on the planet. It's literally made of spills - rare earth metals are extracted straight out of the decades-long polluted soil.

Kamchatka is more like a less-developed, even more BFE, Russian Alaska.

If it's an outdated pesticides, as suggested in another comment, then it's very related. Because it's a leakage from an old Soviet storage tanks.

Heh, yes, 'everything is related to everything somehow' is among the trickiest problems of online forums.

Kamchatka isalso home to a great deal of volcanic and geothermal activity. The cause here might not be human.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KILQ0M5ilIo

It's always worth raising this possibility, though it looks really unlikely in this case. Volcanic and geothermal activity has never released toxic phenols as far as I can tell. Instead you get simpler compounds like carbon dioxide, sulfate, etc. which can also be deadly but only at higher concentrations. This appears to keep killing after dilution.

Fair enough. I saw yellow and though "hrm, sulfur?"

Unless a geothermal event were cutting through and releasing a natural hydrocarbon field (it's happened: Permian–Triassic mass extinction event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_...), organic chemicals would be unlikely.

My understanding is that Kamkatchka is too young geologically, as well as otherwise unsuitable, for there to be large petrochemical reserves.

It seems odd that most of the animals pictured live on the sea floor. There are mostly urchins and the starfish that feed on them with a disheartening number of giant pacific octopus mixed in.

Terrible. It's so upsetting to realise how easily we can (and do) destroy ecosystems.

>to realise how easily we can (and do) destroy ecosystems.

when you are in Russia, especially outside of large cities, especially toward the East or North, the vastness of your surroundings doesn't let you feel that you can do anything that will make any sizable imprint on the surroundings, and that feeling has been ingrained into the psyche for generations (it also correlates, with some philosophers claiming a cause here, with the Russian approach to politics in particular and the whole worldview in general :). As result you do everything you need or want without thinking of consequences, kind of like a puppy behavior toward large dog (the issue of course is that the "puppy" has long since grown up and possesses a large nuclear and chemical industries among the other things) .

It's not surprising considering the way they handled the military nuclear accident last year:

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/10/wreak-bar...

I assume that river wasn’t always yellow. If the river is followed upstream, is there a point where it is not yellow? What is happening just downstream from that? It would seem that a plane or satellite could quickly find the source.

Surfers raised alarm after once pristine waters caused major problems with eyesight, fevers and throat aches.

SURFERS in Kamchatka?! Err...Hardcore! Color me impressed!

It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large population for Kamchatka.

The Russians have always been cavalier about pollution and, as much as it may be hard to believe for some Americans, even more cavalier than here in the US. Not the Russian people of course but their political systems whether Communist or post-Communist. Corruption, lack of accountability and so on. Then obviously Siberia is very large and very sparsely population and interested parties might think: big mess? No big deal.

Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?

> Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?

Well the western US is generally considered to be a delicate arid ecosystems that is really easy to mess up permanently. A lot of it was really messed up from timber cutting, mining, and cattle ranching in the 1800's.

And it only looks like it's recovered because no one remembers what it was like before. There is a valley where the Mormons found a rich verdant prairie. And of course they plowed it under and grew the best crop of wheat they ever saw. And the next winter the winds blew the topsoil away.

The native prairie biome has pretty much been completely eradicated in the US. Pretty impressive for what once dominated the land from Wisconsin to Montana

As a non American, how did it look like?

Timber cutting also destroyed the majority of old growth trees, causing high densities of smaller and younger trees to grow in their place. Today we often think of forests being healthy when we see dense uninterrupted lush green trees. However forests in the western US were sparser previously, with regular wildfires thinning younger trees, sparing older/tougher trees, modulating forest density, and altering the mix of undergrowth/young trees/old growth. There are videos on YouTube showing comparisons of forests from 100 years ago and today, and they look very different as a result of these changes.

Clearly natural. Humans couldn't do that.

What sort of nutters are Greenpeace to blame it on humans?

It's like they have no high school understanding of how the planet works.

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