Oxy Black Sea Plant Is Now in Voters’ Hands

When Occidental Petroleum Corp. signed a contract in 1973 to build a huge fertilizer plant and port on the Black Sea, company Chairman Armand Hammer, the longtime advocate of closer Soviet-American ties who died this week, called the gigantic complex “the crowning achievement of our relations with the Soviet Union.”

But, in one of the Soviet Union’s first referendums on an environmental issue, residents of the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa will vote Sunday on whether to close down parts of the project as a threat to the local population.

Odessa, with a population of more than 1 million, is 10 miles from the plant. Environmental activists want to close what the city council calls the plant’s “most dangerous facilities,” which include four massive tanks for storing ammonia and equipment for pumping it aboard ships.

Environmentalists and factory managers have been sparring on television and in the press to sway public opinion in one of the Soviet Union’s first referendums on an environmental issue.

The potential danger of an accident, environmentalists say, is the greatest threat, because ammonia explodes at a low temperature and then forms a cloud, which can be blown by wind over populated areas. Inhaled, ammonia can be fatal.

“A large accident, explosion or atmospheric release of ammonia could be tragic for the city and nearby populated areas,” a state commission of scientists wrote about the chemical complex in a report on pollution in Odessa.

But the daily expulsion of pollutants into the air and sea are also harmful, according to the report, which called the factory one of the “most dangerous” enterprises in Odessa.

Almost 89% of the ammonia and a quarter of the nitrogen dioxide in Odessa’s highly polluted air comes from the plant, according to the report, commissioned by the Soviet and Ukrainian governments and published earlier this year.

Officials at the Odessa Portside Factory, however, contend their enterprise is responsible for only 1% of Odessa’s air pollution and does not significantly pollute the water. They also say that in the event of an accident, any ammonia cloud would quickly disperse and never reach the city.

The Grigoryevka complex--which also processes ammonia into urea, a chemical used in fertilizers and plastics manufacture--was a key part of a $20 billion, long-term fertilizer agreement that Los Angeles-based Occidental made with the Soviet Union during the first easing of tensions between Moscow and the United States in the 1970s.

The fertilizer complex has the largest ammonia storage capacity in the world and is supplied by a 1,488-mile pipeline, which originates in the industrial Volga River city of Togliatti.

Factory workers remember the plant’s opening day in August, 1978, as a celebration of modern technology and the achievements of the Soviet system. In his keynote address, Hammer called the project “an example of what can be done when men of reason and good will work together to accomplish a common goal.”

“It was a time of great patriotism,” said Pyotr D. Krutogolov, who has worked at the factory since before it was opened.

But since then, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or political openness, has given birth to an environmental movement, which has changed strikingly the public opinion about the factory and Hammer.

“Hammer is an anti-hero here,” said Alfred Tsykalo, a chemist, ecologist and member of the Odessa city council. “Many people feel resentful that, in spite of the fact that Hammer’s ancestors are from this area, he put his huge, harmful factory here so he could make a lot of money.”

Like factory officials across the country, the Grigoryevka managers have been challenged by angry neighbors and environmentalists with placards in their hands and new Soviet democracy to back up their demands.

The grass-roots drive against the factory started after a foreign ship spilled ammonia near the port on Sept. 1, 1988, creating a cloud that hung over the village of Novy Belyary.

“I was riding toward the village on my bicycle and the smell of ammonia kept getting stronger and stronger,” Anatoly T. Lemeshkin, a village resident, recalled. “I went straight to the center of the village where the children play, and everyone was crying and screaming.”

Villagers complain that they suffer from asthma, severe headaches, high blood pressure and early death by stroke and that their children are always ill.

Factory managers have grudgingly agreed to pay to move the 6,000 people from Novy Belyary and two other villages to high-rise apartments in cleaner areas. But the resettlement program is going slowly, because of a lack of construction materials and labor. Many villagers say they cannot move, because they cannot adjust to life without their own land.

Leonid P. Gnachuk, the captain of Grigoryevka port, has joined the environmental battle with articles about ecological problems in local newspapers. Gnachuk argues that the plant should not have been built here at all.

“It’s obvious a chemical factory should never have been built here so close to the sea,” he said. “The danger of an explosion and harm to the people and the environment is too large.”

During the summer of 1989, protests by Novy Belyary residents prevented factory managers from using a new mooring designed for loading phosphates in the port.

But residents said they have no hope for further victories because the factory--whose exports, officials claim, earn the equivalent of $1.26 billion--is too valuable to the government. “They will never close the factory because it earns hard currency,” Lemeshkin said. “In our country’s situation, hard currency is worth more than human lives.”