Norilsk Oil Spill

Date: May 29, 2020 • Location: Kayyerkan, Russian Federation

An oil spill in Norilsk released 17,500 tons of diesel oil into nearby rivers.

The Norilsk diesel oil spill was an industrial disaster near Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. It began on 29 May 2020 when a fuel storage tank at Norilsk-Taimyr Energy's Thermal Power Plant No. 3 failed, flooding local rivers with up to 17,500 tonnes of diesel oil. President Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency in early June. The incident has been described as the second-largest oil spill in modern Russian history, after the 1994 Komi pipeline spill, where 400,000 tonnes of crude oil were released to the environment between August 1994 and January 1995.