Ooze Crudely Rebukes Russian Denials on Oil Spill : Environment: Arctic villagers watch oil from leaking pipeline seep into waterways. Officials downplay disaster.

Oil coats the hulls of fishing boats in the ice along the banks of the Pechora River. In bays and inlets near this Arctic Circle village of reindeer farmers and salmon fishermen, frozen oil droplets fleck the ice.

The black crude is a greasy rebuke to Russian officials, who insist that the majestic Pechora--and the rich fishing grounds that stretch to the Arctic Ocean--have not been polluted by this country’s largest oil spill.

This autumn, the people of Ust-Usa watched helplessly as thousands of tons of oil began oozing into the vast watery network that flows from the desecrated oil fields of Usinsk into the Pechora, then 450 miles north through the tundra to the Barents Sea.

Fishermen say the oil traveled at least 70 miles downstream before the Pechora began to freeze. The riverside meadows in Ust-Usa where cattle fatten each summer are befouled, they say, and the few fish that swam upstream this fall reeked of petroleum and were inedible.

Now the 2,500 villagers are bracing for spring, when the oil-drenched marshes, streams and rivers that feed the Pechora will melt. Unless the oil is excavated from frozen swamps before the thaw, the people of Ust-Usa expect a slimy deluge that could wipe out their way of life.

“If they (officials) say it’s just a miniature, local catastrophe, they are only fooling themselves,” said Viktor Obaidakhanin, an Ust-Usa police major. “We are all living on this one small planet.”

And the damage continues. Earlier this month, journalists and environmentalists discovered more fresh oil hemorrhaging from three new ruptures in the decrepit Usinsk oil pipeline network. One huge leak, captured on videotape by the environmental group Greenpeace, gushed about 13,000 tons of oil, Russian scientists say.

In a practice once typical of Soviet oil fields, cleanup crews tried to get rid of the oil by setting it afire, sending up huge black clouds of toxin-laden smoke that hovered darkly on the horizon.

Yevgeny Grunis, industry minister of the autonomous Republic of Komi, where Usinsk is located, has denied that any new spills have occurred. Other officials said the oil had been spilled in August but only now set ablaze.

The videotape, however, shows a vast black lake of oil, not yet solidified nor covered by snow. At another site visited by journalists this month, tarry pools of oil had oozed over the fresh snow, and cleanup workers said the pipeline had leaked there two days earlier.

The story of the Usinsk oil spill is a familiar Third-World tale of environmental pillage and official indifference, analysts say.

“They get the wealth from our earth, they sell it, and instead of improving the lot of the local population, they ruin our lives,” Obaidakhanin said. “Those in power spit on the people.”

The oil spill began in July, when 23 separate leaks sprang in a 30-mile pipeline owned by Komineft, a former state-owned oil giant based in the city of Usinsk.

Komi officials say 14,033 tons were spilled, while Western estimates range up to 270,000 tons. If Western sources are correct, the accident would be about eight times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

“The debate about how much oil spilled is academic,” Greenpeace biologist Paul Horsman said. “This is the largest of many spills that have occurred here, and there is going to be major environmental damage.”

The spill was discovered Aug. 23, when members of the Usinsk Ecology Committee flying in a helicopter noticed a huge blotch of oil in a swamp north of the city, committee head Sergei V. Zhunyov said.

City officials called a meeting of Komineft and the seven other companies--three of them Western--that use the 22-year-old pipeline, a decaying facility that all sides agree should have been scrapped at least four years ago. But the oilmen refused to shut the pipeline for repairs.

“They gave many reasons for not wanting to shut it down,” Zhunyov said. “If they had done it sooner, maybe this tragedy could have been avoided.”

Komineft officials promised to have a new pipeline completed by December, and the city agreed to allow the old one to keep operating until Sept. 6, while a bypass was being readied.

But on Sept. 5, the pipeline sprang another massive leak. Thousands of tons gushed into the Palnik-Shor creek, blackened the Kolva River and moved into the Pechora.

Earlier this month, workers at Palnik-Shor were using an excavator to smash the ice, scoop congealed oil from the frigid water and pour the black gunk atop a heap of dirt.

Workers said the oil recovered from areas near roads will be reprocessed whenever possible, but in remote areas it will be burned. Western environmentalists shudder at the prospect of giant clouds, laced with toxic hydrocarbons, blanketing the tundra.

As temperatures plunged to 15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit this month, the struggle to clean one 20-foot-square pit looked haphazard and excruciatingly slow. By official estimates, 66 acres have been contaminated.

“I think if they can remove even 50% before the spring melt, that will be very good,” Zhunyov said. “They’ll never be able to clean all of it. It will always wash into the rivers every time it rains.”

Greenpeace, the Green Cross and other ecologists are calling for an immediate shutdown of the pipeline and an international effort to halt the spread of the catastrophe.

Komi officials say they can handle the cleanup themselves--and accuse Western companies of dramatizing the spill to sell expensive oil-spill cleanup equipment.

However, workers at Palnik-Shor were unsure they could finish the huge job before the thaw.

“Of course we need international help,” said Ivan V. Dorokhin, 43. “If we don’t clean it up in time, the oil will be in Norway by spring.”

Today, the Kolva River is coated with more than a foot of frozen oil. Moose and bears fled the area long ago. But tundra swans, ducks and geese still nest in nearby marshes in springtime.

Even the gruff oil workers are praying that the migrating birds will not stop in Usinsk this year. Last week, they found the corpse of an oil-drenched Arctic fox.

Dorokhin and his comrades say the new capitalist oil companies care as little about the environment as their Soviet predecessors--and far less about the oil workers. The laborers jumped, though, at the chance to earn $9.70 in cash a day from a cleanup company called Priroda, as Komineft has not paid their salaries in five months.

Instead of money, the workers have been receiving coupons that are valid only at Usinsk stores that are supplied by Komineft. The coupons have been dubbed “Leonidovs” after former Komineft General Director Valentin Z. Leonidov.

The despised company scrip will buy food, soap, razor blades, cheap boots and other essentials. But Leonidovs cannot be used to pay a phone bill or buy a train ticket, and only one bread store in this city of 40,000 will accept them, said Natalia Nikolayevna, a 32-year-old shopper, who added: “If the kids get sick, I give them whatever medicine we still have left.”

One oil worker complained that he had forgotten the taste of vodka. Another said he could not get Komineft to pay his back wages in cash in time for him to attend his mother’s funeral.

Bitter about the turn their lives have taken since the fall of the Soviet Union, local residents say the Republic of Komi is under the political thumb of the oil company. They call the region “the Republic of Komineft.”

Workers said that when Komineft was privatized, they wound up with just a handful of shares, while managers snagged thousands. Employees call it prikhvatizatsia-- a pun that combines privatization with the verb to seize.

“They only think of one thing--how to line their pockets,” said Vladimir P. Fedulov, 32, who operates the earthmoving machines.

He complained that Komineft pleads poverty when asked to build a new pipeline, pay its workers, buy spare parts or even supply lubricating oil for the equipment. But somehow the oil barons have the money to cruise Usinsk in shiny new Mercedes-Benzes.

“They think of us as slaves, not workers,” Fedulov complained.

Since the spill, the oil company has demonstrated its political clout.

The former head of the Usinsk Ecology Committee, who told authorities and journalists he believed that Komineft had grossly understated the accident, promptly lost his job when the agency was “reorganized,” said Valentina Semyashkina of the Committee to Save the Pechora.

The Usinsk Ecology Committee’s Zhunyov, who survived the purge, confirmed that a “reorganization” had occurred but declined to discuss details. After a brief interview last week, he asked reporters to leave quickly, saying he was expecting a visit by security officials and did not want them to find a foreign journalist in his office.

Russian officials have dismissed worries that the spill will foul the Pechora or the Arctic Ocean.

Yevgeny Khailov, chairman of a commission that inspected the Usinsk accident, said “there is no oil” in the Pechora--but even if there is, “it could have come from anywhere,” the newspaper Argumenti i Facti reported.

When the Moscow press and Western media began crying cover-up, Komi officials suggested that American estimates of the oil spill had been deliberately inflated as part of what one TV broadcast called President “Bill Clinton’s renewed doctrine of U.S. unconditional supremacy in the world.”

Komi officials have repeatedly suggested that Western oil companies exaggerated the size of the spill to drive down the price of Komineft stock, then bought up shares that had fallen to one-third of their earlier price.

The conspiracy theory appeared to have a wide following in Usinsk, where many suspect Western oil companies of making off with Russia’s mineral wealth and leaving as little money as possible behind to rebuild the decaying Soviet-built oil infrastructure.

But Ust-Usa residents said they would be happy to see Western oil companies pumping in their neighborhood, as long as the work was done cleanly. They say the oil industry has brought them nothing but harm.

Although they live 19 miles from vast natural gas reserves, villagers in Ust-Usa must heat their homes with wood they chop themselves.

For 20 years, authorities have failed to deliver on promises to run a gas pipeline to the village.

Meanwhile, the longer oil development goes on, the slimmer nature’s pickings. Locals depended on fish caught in the Pechora, berries and mushrooms picked in the Arctic wilderness. Now, villagers say the fish are disappearing, river water is no longer fit to drink, and the government turns a deaf ear to their complaints.

Valentina Svyatokho, an official on an Ust-Usa collective farm, recalled the magnificent catches of her childhood, when every villager had barrels overflowing with dried and salted fish. Last week, she said, a local could not even find enough fish to serve at his daughter’s wedding.

“We miss our fish,” she said with sorrow.