A stinky yellow cloud resembling tear gas billowed across a village in Russia's Ural Mountains after a canister with rocket fuel leaked at a processing facility discharging about 20 liters that turned into mist in the atmosphere, Russian media reported.
Nobody was reported injured due to the incident, which occurred at a military base in the village of Nizhnesakmarsky in the Orenburg region, said Yaroslav Roschupkin, a spokesman for the Central Military District, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The mustard-yellow clouds were produced by a chemical reaction between the leaked fuel and the atmosphere, Roschupkin was quoted as saying. Videos posted online showed billows of yellow mist drifting over the village.
Roschupkin said that the cloud "only lasted for a few minutes before the wind dispersed everything," Interfax reported. But a local resident told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that the mist lingered over the village for two days.
"The plume was accompanied by a pungent odor that for us who have served in the army was very much like the suffocating smell of tear gas," a local resident was quoted as saying.
In the wake of the incident, the local branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry was flooded by calls from local residents concerned about the fumes, an unidentified emergency service official told Interfax, adding that preliminary tests indicated no danger to inhabitants or military personnel.
Nobody has come to the local hospital with symptoms of chemical poisoning, but medics said the village administrators had warned them to be prepared to treat possible victims and to have an ambulance on call, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
