MOSCOW – A broken pipeline in Siberia led to a dramatic scene on Saturday, when partially refined oil caught fire on the ice of the frozen Ob River, according to Russian authorities and media reports.
The spill occurred in the heart of Russia’s oil industry, the Khanty-Mansiysk region of Siberia, which is dotted with wells and crossed by pipelines, but is sparsely populated. Press reports said one person was injured.
A local environmental regulator, Svetlana Radionova, posted a statement and an online video saying that an underwater pipeline had burst and that “a fire was discovered in the Ob River”.
The video showed flames leaping into the air from what appeared to be the center of Ob, one of the huge Siberian rivers that flow south to north in the Arctic Ocean.
Reports from the Tass and Interfax news agencies did not describe the scale of the spill, except to note the size of the burning hole in the river ice as being about a quarter of an acre in size.
Tass, a state news agency, cited the unidentified emergency response and industry officials saying the pipeline was carrying a mixture of partially refined oil products, including propane and butane. Reports say the pipeline also carried “light fractions” of oil from a refinery, a description that could include liquids, which are more dangerous to the environment around a spill than gases like propane.
The nearest large city is Nizhnevartovsk, the reports say. They described the breach as being in an area so remote that the nearest inhabited settlement was 27 miles away. The Tass report said the pipeline has been closed and efforts are underway to pump the content along its length so that it does not spill into the river.