Boiling oil spills onto street outside Russian refinery after drone strike ignites storage tank

Source: Veniamin Kondratyev

Boiling oil spilled onto a street outside an oil refinery in Tuapse, Krasnodar Krai, after a storage tank boiled over during a fire there on April 28. Alexei Klushin, head of the regional Emergency Situations Ministry office, described the incident to Governor Veniamin Kondratyev in a conversation posted to the governor’s Telegram channel.

“There was a boilover and discharge of petroleum products from tank number three, as a result of which burning oil spread onto the road and several vehicles were damaged. The situation is now under control,” Klushin said.

In the recording, Klushin showed the governor where the petroleum products had “splashed out and flowed along the road.” A car with a melted trunk is visible in the video. Kondratyev ordered the evacuation of local residents.

The burning petroleum products reached Koshkina Street, which runs alongside the refinery, the Telegram channel Astra found. Authorities evacuated residents of Koshkina Street, Pushkina Street, and the surrounding lanes.

Развернуть

The fire broke out at the Tuapse refinery in the early hours of April 28 after a Ukrainian drone strike. No injuries were reported, authorities said.

This is already the third Ukrainian strike on Tuapse in two weeks to cause a fire and serious environmental consequences. The first strike left an oil slick covering about 10,000 square meters (107,639 square feet) in the Black Sea; the second degraded the city’s air quality and triggered “oil” rain.

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