RUSSIAN authorities have declared a state of emergency in an Arctic region after a huge fuel tank ruptured and leaked 20,000 tons of diesel into rivers, turning them blood red.

A massive reserve fuel tank belonging to a thermal power station burst Friday near Norilsk, a remote city in northern Russia about 300 kilometers above the Arctic Circle.

The tank, in an industrial zone owned by the Russian mining conglomerate Norilsk Nikel, contained around 20,000 tons of diesel, and most of that has leaked into nearby rivers and a reservoir in the Taimyrskii Dolgano-Nenetskii district, according to Russian emergency officials.

The pollution is so visible that it can be seen in satellite images on Russia’s equivalent of Google Maps, Yandex Maps. Environmental campaigners are warning of potential longterm harm to the area.

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday declared the spill a federal emergency and criticized regional authorities for not responding sooner. The Krasnoyarsk region, which includes Norilsk, announced a local state of emergency Sunday, two days after the leak occurred.

Officials blamed the delay in reacting to the leak on the local authorities’ failure to inform them of the scale of the incident.

Alexander Uss, governor of the Krasnoyarsk region, a massive Siberian territory that includes Norilsk, told Putin in a televised video call Wednesday that he had only discovered the seriousness of the situation when local people posted videos on social media.

That prompted an unusually irritated response from Putin, who demanded to know why it had taken two days for authorities to learn of the disaster.

“What, we’re going to learn about emergency situations from social media now, are we?” Putin told Uss.

When the leak first happened, Krasnoyarsk’s emergency ministry told reporters a car had crashed into the fuel tanks, causing a fire, but no major leak was mentioned. It later was discovered that the car had caught fire after it was covered by the huge flood of leaking fuel.

(SD-Agencies)