WAR IS ECOCIDE
Pavlohrad Chemical Plant Blast Could Spell Eco-Disaster for UkraineBY ALEKS PHILLIPS
ON 5/3/23
An explosion at a storage facility near a chemical plant in the eastern part of Ukraine known to have held rocket fuel could pose the threat of an environmental disaster.
On April 30, images emerged of a huge explosion near the city of Pavlohrad, in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. It was at first thought to be an explosion at a rail station caused by a Russian missile strike. The blast has since been geo-located to the area of a nearby chemical plant.
Pavlohrad is strategically located in an area through which a Ukrainian counteroffensive could move. The strike on the plant comes as the Kremlin said it was targeting facilities used to produce ammunition, weapons and equipment for Ukraine's military.
An explosion at a storage facility near a chemical plant in the eastern part of Ukraine known to have held rocket fuel could pose the threat of an environmental disaster.
On April 30, images emerged of a huge explosion near the city of Pavlohrad, in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. It was at first thought to be an explosion at a rail station caused by a Russian missile strike. The blast has since been geo-located to the area of a nearby chemical plant.
Pavlohrad is strategically located in an area through which a Ukrainian counteroffensive could move. The strike on the plant comes as the Kremlin said it was targeting facilities used to produce ammunition, weapons and equipment for Ukraine's military.
Firefighters work to extinguish a blaze caused by one of the Russian missile strikes on Pavlohrad at the weekend, on May 1, 2023. One of those missiles is believed to have hit a rocket-fuel storage facility.
SERHIY LYSAK/DNIPROPETROVSK STATE ADMINISTRATION
Ukrainian sources reported Ukraine's air defense shot down 15 out of the 18 missiles launched by Russian Tupolev Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers on Monday night. The Russian defense ministry said the strikes had successfully disrupted the production of military resources. However, Philip Ingram, a former British intelligence officer, told Newsweek that the strikes may affect Ukrainian preparations for its counteroffensive but are unlikely to have a significant impact.
The Pavlohrad Chemical Plant was a Soviet-era facility for fueling intercontinental ballistic missiles. However, it had since been converted to a fuel-recycling operation.
The plant has also been used for the testing of Alder-M and Neptune missiles—the latter of which was used to sink the Russian flagship Moskva in the Black Sea in 2022. The facility sits on the road to the Donbas region, where Russian forces have been preparing for a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
On May 1, open-source intelligence expert Oliver Alexander geo-located footage from the explosion. He tweeted that it seemed to confirm the plant had been hit and was storing old SS-24 booster rockets.
Footage of the massive explosion in Pavhlorad, Ukraine last evening. pic.twitter.com/ul1dUH5jEG— Faytuks News Δ (@Faytuks) May 1, 2023
GeoConfirmed, a volunteer outfit that shares data with Bellingcat, used sight lines from various video clips of the explosion. All of these point to an area used as a storage facility next to the chemical plant. GeoConfirmed added on Tuesday: "What exploded remains unclear."
Satellite imagery captured the same day showed a massive crater where one of the storage facilities had once been. The images matched prior aerial views of the site.
Newsweek approached the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources via email for comment on Wednesday.
Yellow: Storage facility with bunkers.
Red: The actual Chemical plant.
What exploded remains unclear.
14/9 pic.twitter.com/nRscNGZl1U— GeoConfirmed (@GeoConfirmed) May 2, 2023
Serhiy Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast, in which the plant is located, wrote on Telegram on Monday that an "industrial enterprise was damaged." Lysak added that a "fire broke out there, which the rescuers have already put out."
Marc Glass, principal environmental consultant at Downstream Strategies, who advises on contamination events, told Newsweek that the pollutants from the fire were "going to be the same types of things—particulates and all of the hydrocarbons—that happen from incomplete combustion."
However, he noted that rocket fuels would "almost certainly" contain an oxygen source as part of the fuel, and so it would have "much more complete combustion, so that impurities would probably be lower."
"The biggest environmental concern I would think of with suppressing a fire like that is, of course, PFOS, because you would really need to starve that sort of fire," Glass added. "Those are always a big problem."
Perfluorooctanesulfonic acids (PFOS) are used in, among other products, fire suppressant foams used for fighting extremely hot fires by lowering their temperature and smothering the fuel they are burning. According to the National Library of Medicine, it can be acutely toxic to humans and can damage animal health.
There have long been concerns about the potential for an environmental disaster at the plant. In 2020, the BBC Ukrainian service reported that, as of that year, over 1,800 tons of expired solid rocket fuel was stored at the plant.
Landsat overnight shows the explosion as up in the SS-24 storage area. pic.twitter.com/iSJh7GFBBy— robwormald (@robwormald) May 2, 2023
Leonid Shiman, general director of the plant, told the outlet that an explosion at the facility could create a man-made environmental disaster that would impact both the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and the four regions neighboring it.
Shiman referenced an explosion at an ammunitions depot in Balaklia, in Kharkiv, in 2017—which led Ukraine to request disaster assistance from NATO. He said that, then, just 180 kilograms (397 pounds) of rocket fuel had ignited. This is 1:10,000th of the amount stored at the Pavlohrad Chemical Plant. Shiman added that one storage unit at the site contained 50,000 kilograms (110,000 pounds) of rocket fuel.
Ukrainian scientists studied the potential impacts of an emergency at the plant in 2014, simulating the dispersion of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
The scientists' modelling suggested, depending on wind direction, that seven minutes after fuel began burning at the site, a contamination area would stretch to the western edge of Pavlohrad. After 19 minutes, it would reach across the city.
"In the event of an emergency release on the territory of the Pavlograd chemical plant, there is a risk of toxic damage to people in the city of Pavlograd with a fatal outcome," the report found. It added that "the risk of fatal injury to people in the case of emission of chemically hazardous substances into the atmosphere" should be "of particular importance."
The scientists' study showed that, 30 minutes after an accident at the storage site, there would be 18.02 milligrams (0.00063 ounces) of hazardous substances including hydrogen chloride—a corrosive chemical that can cause respiratory illness—per cubic meter in the atmosphere and 4.86mg (0.00017 ounces) indoors near the plant. The scientists added that, in both cases, this exceeded the 4.5mg per cubic meter (0.0043 milligrams per liter) limit of what is deemed harmful.
Glass said these would represent "significantly elevated" levels of air contaminants, especially indoors, but added: "I think you'd see significantly higher ambient air pollution levels from things like forest fires, where there's visible haze and stuff like that."
Update 05/03/23, 10:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from Marc Glass
Ukrainian sources reported Ukraine's air defense shot down 15 out of the 18 missiles launched by Russian Tupolev Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers on Monday night. The Russian defense ministry said the strikes had successfully disrupted the production of military resources. However, Philip Ingram, a former British intelligence officer, told Newsweek that the strikes may affect Ukrainian preparations for its counteroffensive but are unlikely to have a significant impact.
The Pavlohrad Chemical Plant was a Soviet-era facility for fueling intercontinental ballistic missiles. However, it had since been converted to a fuel-recycling operation.
The plant has also been used for the testing of Alder-M and Neptune missiles—the latter of which was used to sink the Russian flagship Moskva in the Black Sea in 2022. The facility sits on the road to the Donbas region, where Russian forces have been preparing for a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
On May 1, open-source intelligence expert Oliver Alexander geo-located footage from the explosion. He tweeted that it seemed to confirm the plant had been hit and was storing old SS-24 booster rockets.
Footage of the massive explosion in Pavhlorad, Ukraine last evening. pic.twitter.com/ul1dUH5jEG— Faytuks News Δ (@Faytuks) May 1, 2023
GeoConfirmed, a volunteer outfit that shares data with Bellingcat, used sight lines from various video clips of the explosion. All of these point to an area used as a storage facility next to the chemical plant. GeoConfirmed added on Tuesday: "What exploded remains unclear."
Satellite imagery captured the same day showed a massive crater where one of the storage facilities had once been. The images matched prior aerial views of the site.
Newsweek approached the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources via email for comment on Wednesday.
Yellow: Storage facility with bunkers.
Red: The actual Chemical plant.
What exploded remains unclear.
14/9 pic.twitter.com/nRscNGZl1U— GeoConfirmed (@GeoConfirmed) May 2, 2023
Serhiy Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast, in which the plant is located, wrote on Telegram on Monday that an "industrial enterprise was damaged." Lysak added that a "fire broke out there, which the rescuers have already put out."
Marc Glass, principal environmental consultant at Downstream Strategies, who advises on contamination events, told Newsweek that the pollutants from the fire were "going to be the same types of things—particulates and all of the hydrocarbons—that happen from incomplete combustion."
However, he noted that rocket fuels would "almost certainly" contain an oxygen source as part of the fuel, and so it would have "much more complete combustion, so that impurities would probably be lower."
"The biggest environmental concern I would think of with suppressing a fire like that is, of course, PFOS, because you would really need to starve that sort of fire," Glass added. "Those are always a big problem."
Perfluorooctanesulfonic acids (PFOS) are used in, among other products, fire suppressant foams used for fighting extremely hot fires by lowering their temperature and smothering the fuel they are burning. According to the National Library of Medicine, it can be acutely toxic to humans and can damage animal health.
There have long been concerns about the potential for an environmental disaster at the plant. In 2020, the BBC Ukrainian service reported that, as of that year, over 1,800 tons of expired solid rocket fuel was stored at the plant.
Landsat overnight shows the explosion as up in the SS-24 storage area. pic.twitter.com/iSJh7GFBBy— robwormald (@robwormald) May 2, 2023
Leonid Shiman, general director of the plant, told the outlet that an explosion at the facility could create a man-made environmental disaster that would impact both the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and the four regions neighboring it.
Shiman referenced an explosion at an ammunitions depot in Balaklia, in Kharkiv, in 2017—which led Ukraine to request disaster assistance from NATO. He said that, then, just 180 kilograms (397 pounds) of rocket fuel had ignited. This is 1:10,000th of the amount stored at the Pavlohrad Chemical Plant. Shiman added that one storage unit at the site contained 50,000 kilograms (110,000 pounds) of rocket fuel.
Ukrainian scientists studied the potential impacts of an emergency at the plant in 2014, simulating the dispersion of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
The scientists' modelling suggested, depending on wind direction, that seven minutes after fuel began burning at the site, a contamination area would stretch to the western edge of Pavlohrad. After 19 minutes, it would reach across the city.
"In the event of an emergency release on the territory of the Pavlograd chemical plant, there is a risk of toxic damage to people in the city of Pavlograd with a fatal outcome," the report found. It added that "the risk of fatal injury to people in the case of emission of chemically hazardous substances into the atmosphere" should be "of particular importance."
The scientists' study showed that, 30 minutes after an accident at the storage site, there would be 18.02 milligrams (0.00063 ounces) of hazardous substances including hydrogen chloride—a corrosive chemical that can cause respiratory illness—per cubic meter in the atmosphere and 4.86mg (0.00017 ounces) indoors near the plant. The scientists added that, in both cases, this exceeded the 4.5mg per cubic meter (0.0043 milligrams per liter) limit of what is deemed harmful.
Glass said these would represent "significantly elevated" levels of air contaminants, especially indoors, but added: "I think you'd see significantly higher ambient air pollution levels from things like forest fires, where there's visible haze and stuff like that."
Update 05/03/23, 10:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from Marc Glass
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