The Naryn River has once again been contaminated, with oil floating on the water's surface.
The Naryn River has once again been contaminated, with oil floating on the surface of the water.
A truck transporting oil overturned on the Bishkek — Osh highway, spilling oil from the tank onto the road and into the Naryn River. Oil is the oily residue left after the distillation of gasoline and kerosene from crude oil.
The Bishkek-Osh road experiences dozens of ecological disasters every year involving overturned fuel trucks, resulting in hundreds of tons of highly toxic petroleum products: kerosene, oil, gasoline spilled into high-altitude transboundary water intake rivers: Ablu-Naryn-Kara-Baltinka, Chychkan, and cubic meters of contaminated soil with complete destruction of flora and fauna for dozens of meters around.
To mitigate the consequences of pollution, technical reclamation is initially carried out worldwide. The spilled petroleum product is collected from the water and soil using sorbents. Contaminated soil is removed and stored at a special technical landfill, while clean soil is placed where the contaminated soil was removed. Throughout the recorded traffic accidents involving fuel trucks on the Bishkek-Osh road, NOT A SINGLE (!) reclamation has been conducted.
High-altitude ecosystems are sensitive to any anthropogenic impact. If they are not cleaned of petroleum products in a timely manner, there will be a significant negative impact on the environment – for decades, residues of diesel fuel will be leached by groundwater and oxidized in the soil.
At the same time, specialists note that the ecological damage is unlikely to be fully compensated. This concerns the cleaning of the surfaces and bottoms of rivers, as well as soil remediation. It is also noted that the maximum allowable concentrations of pollutants in the rivers where petroleum products enter in case of accidents can exceed the norm by hundreds of times.
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