Fertilizer giant EuroChem said Thursday that the only fertilizer released into the air at its Tuapse shipping terminal was part of a test, required by regulators to ensure that the facility’s safeguards work properly.
Thousands of residents of the small town on the Black Sea coast protested the terminal over the weekend, claiming that a fertilizer spill led to several illnesses among residents and the death of several dolphins.
EuroChem spokesman Vladimir Torin said a test loading was carried out on March 15 to satisfy technical requirements. A small amount of dust was released in order to set sensors that operate a dust filter, he said.
“There were no breakdowns, no victims, no poisonings, no emergency situations at all,” he said by telephone from Tuapse.
The Tuapse branch of the Transportation Prosecutor’s Office has charged the company with nine administrative violations, including loading fertilizer before the Tuapse Bulk Terminal was operational and violating environmental protection legislation.
EuroChem paid the fines imposed by the prosecutor’s office and is waiting for a decision by the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Atomic Inspection to bring the terminal into operation, Torin said.
EuroChem carried out environmental inspections after the test loading, and according to the results of the test, the air quality around the coast “meets the requirements of regulatory documents” and is not harmful to people.
But an atmospheric test conducted between March 18 and March 23 by the Tuapse branch of the Laboratory Analyses Center (controlled by the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Atomic Inspection) showed that the concentration of ammonia, which had spilled into the atmosphere in the loading area, was 1.074 milligrams per meter, which exceeds the legal limit.
EuroChem was loading carbamide, used in fertilizer and animal feed, onto two ships owned by foreign companies, including a Turkish one, Torin said. He added that the test might be skewed because samples were taken from a part of the ship where ammonia concentration could be high.
The head of Tuapse’s central municipal hospital, Vladimir Svazyan, was not available for comment Thursday, but he told reporters that the hospital had received no poisoning victims as patients.
EuroChem said it was at fault for not warning the town residents or the Tuapse administration that there would be a test loading.
Viktor Koshel, head of the Tuapse district, said it was the lack of transparency at EuroChem that resulted in the uproar among the city residents.
The local administration will “make every effort to close the Tuapse Bulk Terminal if the March event or a similar incident occurs again,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
Tuapse residents and environmentalists on Wednesday asked local deputies to hold a referendum on closing the terminal. They also called for a moratorium on building new industrial plants in the community and expanding existing ones.