Spring Thaw Reveals Slick of Russian Shame : Disaster: Only as snow melts is the extent of damage from August oil spill becoming known.

The Arctic spring has snatched away the clean, white blanket of snow that shielded this nation’s largest oil spill from scrutiny all winter.

Underneath, the naked tundra bog is a vast study in slime.

Oily swamps dot both sides of the road that leads north from this concrete-block oil town, about 1,000 miles northeast of Moscow, into the dilapidated oil fields.

Along the right side of the road runs a 22-year-old pipeline that ruptured in about a dozen places last August, pumping about 100,000 tons of hot crude into a watery expanse of tundra in a mess estimated to be three times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

The Usinsk spill is undoubtedly one of the world’s largest; had it occurred in the United States or Europe, $1 billion and 1,000 people would have been committed to cleaning up the catastrophe, say expatriate veterans of the Exxon Valdez cleanup who have been hired with $125 million in Western loans to try to contain the devastation.

Because of the spill’s remote location near the Arctic Circle, Russian officials’ attempts to conceal the disaster and the numbing frequency of ecological catastrophes in the former Soviet Union, the magnitude of the Usinsk disaster has not been fully appreciated in the West.

But ecologists say the spill--and two decades of environmental pillage that preceded it--has devastated the fragile environment of the tundra and will contribute to the ongoing degradation of the Arctic Ocean.

Officially, the Usinsk spill has contaminated an area about equal to 70 football fields and includes six major streams and dozens of minor creeks. But that includes only what lies to the right of the road. No one has even estimated how much oil has been spilled into lakes and swamps that lie along the road’s left side.

The tundra is oil-drenched, gashed and eroded.

It recovers at a glacial pace, and there are no plans here to try to heal it.

Fifty miles of greasy puddles, oil lakes, corroded pipes and rusty pumps attest to the decaying, neglected Soviet-era infrastructure that caused this wreck, as well as a spectacular gas pipeline explosion that occurred 200 miles away in Ukhta last week and countless other Siberian oil spills.

The extent of the damage from the latest Usinsk spill can only be compared to the ravaged and torched oil fields of Kuwait.

For at least half a mile along one dying stream bed, a shiny layer of crude lies more than a foot deep. Birch and pine trees growing on the banks look as if they were smothered with thick shoe polish.

A nearby lake is a favorite resting ground for migrating mallard ducks. But if the stench of oil burning nearby does not deter them from landing this month, biologists say they will perish.

Cleanup teams, funded by the World Bank, are working round-the-clock to build dams and booms to keep spring floods from washing the remaining oil here down dozens of fast-flowing creeks and into the majestic Pechora River. They are anxious to prevent further damage to the once-rich fishing grounds that stretch 450 miles down the Pechora into the Arctic Ocean.

“Our goal right now is to contain the oil within the area that is already contaminated,” said Bill Stillings, project manager for AES/Hartec, the U.S.-Australian joint venture hired to clean up what amounts to a dozen different spills fanning out along 16 miles of pipeline.

“It’s a lot of oil,” the big Alaskan said.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has lent the mop-up effort $25 million; the World Bank has provided $100 million--$45 million to Hartec to clean up last summer’s spill and the rest to replace the leaky pipeline.

Hartec’s operation is made up of 26 expatriates and 260 Russian workers.

The company is getting a crash course in the difficulty of doing business in Russia.

The firm was not hired until March, less than two months before the spring thaw began; so far, it has received only $6 million. And its first shipment of oil pumps and skimmers arrived this week only after a tussle with Russian customs. Hartec expected to pay a $2,500 fee to import some of its special equipment. But as of Thursday, Russian customs was demanding $180,000, Stillings said.

Moreover, the Russian Federal Security Service--the latest incarnation of the KGB--will not let Hartec film the sprawling spill site from a helicopter, a standard step in the West. No explanation has been offered, although there is a ballistic missile early warning base nearby.

Finally, Hartec has had to build nine miles of road through thawing swamp to get its equipment to the remote site. Its teams have built or reinforced enormous drainage dams and constructed massive earthworks to hold oil-laden floodwaters back.

Once the danger of flooding passes, workers will begin recovering the spilled oil that is collecting behind the dams.

But it is too late to catch oil that gushed into rivers and froze last autumn. Now that muck has melted and coated the banks of the lower Kolva River, whose oily waters run into the Usa River before joining the Pechora at the town of Ust-Usa.

Two weeks ago, an early thaw sent football-size chunks of black crude flowing down the Kolva, said Alexander Milyukin, an Ust-Usa ship captain.

Cleanup crews working for Komineft, the company that owns the pipeline, responded by setting the oil ablaze.

“The Kolva was on fire. I saw it burning for two days,” said Milyukin, who is also a Usinsk City Council member. “There were rainbows all over the river and balls of oil.”

A massive oil and ice slick sailed down the two-mile-wide Pechora earlier this week, said Alexander A. Nezhensky, fish inspector for Ust-Usa.

He said the slick was a mile long and 50 yards wide; it confirmed his worst fears about the bleak future for local fishermen.

“There have not been any salmon here for four or five years,” he said.

A burly man made bigger by his winter-padded camouflage fatigues, he puffed as he trudged up the steep bank of the Pechora, past the log cabins where the native Komi people have lived off the rich Arctic Circle fish and wildlife for more than a hundred years.

In the last decade, fish catches in the Pechora have dropped tenfold, a trend locals blame on 20 years of slovenly development of the oil fields upstream.

Usinsk oil workers say spills are so routine that nobody would have paid much attention to August’s giant accident if Western companies working in the area had not reported it.

And even before the latest spill, so much oil had soaked into the spongy tundra that black crude washed into rivers every spring, fishermen said.

This year, the few fish that have been caught in the Pechora were puny and stank of oil.

“You shouldn’t eat them, but people do,” Nezhensky said. “Otherwise they live on potatoes, bread and tea. Actually, they don’t live, they exist.”

Komineft has been fined $600,000 for its pipeline spill. But it can’t pay much of that because of its severe financial problems and high taxes, company officials said.

The company did give each resident of Ust-Usa 36,000 rubles--about $7--in accident compensation.

“People call it ‘coffin money’--though for that money, you can’t even buy a coffin,” town Mayor Lidia F. Khozyaina said.

Komineft has already replaced 28 miles of corroded pipe in the area of last year’s spill. A 30-mile section of Western-funded replacement pipe is under construction and could open by August, said Sergei M. Kuznetsov, who works for Komineft’s local subsidiary.

But even while the main pipe is being revamped, dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller feeder lines, wellheads and pumping stations continue to hemorrhage oil or oil-laden drilling water into the fragile tundra.

The Itar-Tass news agency has reported that nearly 40 leaks have been discovered in the Komi fields since the Usinsk accident last summer. The last spill was reported April 13.