USINSK, Far North -- A government commission investigating a large oil spill in northern Russia warned Tuesday that spring flooding next year could further pollute the salmon-rich Pechora River.


The interagency government panel also disputed reports that the spill was among the largest ever, although it offered no final figure on the size.


"As a result of a visual inspection of the area of the oil spill, a conclusion can be made that the accident hasn't led to global pollution of the environment, and can't be assessed as an environmental catastrophe,'' the commission said, reported Itar-Tass.


The panel also urged authorities to clean up the spill before the spring thaw and rains next year. Cleanup efforts have already been hampered by snow and ice in the region, and some of the polluted zones are hard to reach.


The spill, which resulted from a series of ruptures in a 52-kilometer pipeline carrying oil from wells operated by Russian companies and joint Russian-American and Russian-Canadian ventures, was long ignored by local oil authorities.


Residents of Usinsk, 1,600 kilometers northeast of Moscow, said serious cleanup efforts, including burning the oil along river banks, began only in September after small streams in the area became "black with oil."


Newspapers continued to criticize the government and the operator of the pipeline for their response to the spill, which U.S. authorities have said could be as large as 270,000 tons. Russian officials, on the other hand, say the ruptured pipeline dumped between 14,000 and 60,000 tons.


"A large-scale disaster has again caught government departments unaware," the daily newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta said. "An oil spill once again has taken by surprise the organizations whose job it is to stop it from happening. This, alas, has already become commonplace in this country."


Russian newspapers were particularly angry that the first reports on the accident appeared in The New York Times.


"One thing is clear," wrote Komsomolskaya Pravda. "Had it not been for The New York Times, nobody would ever have learned of the disaster." Environmentalists charge that many oil spills in Russia either go unreported or are hushed up. Greenpeace cites 50 million tons of oil spilled a year as the "most modest official estimate."


According to Greenpeace, authorities failed to release any information about two mammoth spills in the oil-rich Tyumen region of Siberia. The organization claims those spills totaled 500,000 tons, in 1989, and 420,000 tons, in late May-early June 1993. Only two recorded spills in history have been bigger.