Russian investigators say an Arctic oil spill threatening the remote Komi republic is 20 times smaller than Western estimates of ecological disaster.
An official commission believes 98,000 barrels or 4.1 million gallons of oil leaked from a damaged pipeline, well below the 1.8 million barrels estimated by a U.S. oil firm.Itar-Tass news agency said Saturday the commission had complained that foreign reports of the leak were badly exaggerated.
"The volume of oil which flowed onto the ground . . . was 14,033 tons, the same figure as that given by pipeline company Komineft," Tass said.
Local environmental experts have said they believed 64,000 tons of oil leaked from the pipeline, which links oil-producing regions with refineries in central Russia.
The republic has declared a state of emergency and U.S. officials in Alaska say the Russians have asked the Americans for help, including special equipment for cleaning up.
The spill prompted fears that a potentially devastating spread of oil across frozen wastes in the former Soviet Union could wreak widespread ecological damage.
The spill, the result of pipeline leaks and the rupture of a holding dam in the Komi republic, was estimated abroad to be far larger than Alaska's Exxon Valdez spill, the worst in the United States.
Steve Shropshire, executive director of the multinational Arctic organization Northern Forum, said Friday the governor of Russia's Nenets Autonomous Region and the president of the Komi Republic had asked for assistance.
In a letter sent Thursday, Nenets Governor Y. Komarovsky said rivers in the Pechora basin had been "heavily polluted by oil products."
Friday, Komi President Y.A. Spiridonov sent a letter to the U.S. Arctic group saying his region was "in dire need of special equipment for cleaning the liquid containing oil from the territories."