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1. Perevoznaya Bay is an open bay, and in case of an oil spill, water currents will carry oil over a wide area.
2. The high volume of tanker traffic between the area's many islands during the windy storm season makes the occurrence of an oil spill a near certainty.
3. The Khasansky area, where the Perevoznaya Bay is situated, is also a vital economic zone for recreation, aquaculture, and fisheries. The local population is reliant on those economies and so is strongly opposed to the construction of an oil terminal nearby.
4. Oil spills in the Amur Bay would threaten to pollute:
- The most popular beaches and tourist resorts in Primorsky Krai, visited by tens of thousands of tourists annually;
- The coasts of Vladivostok, located opposite Perevoznaya in the Amur Bay;
- Primorsky Krai's main commercial aquaculture farms and important fish spawning grounds, on which local Russian fishermen depend;
- The Far East Marine Biosphere Reserve that is home to large populations of marine mammals and seabirds. It also provides spawning grounds for valuable fish species that migrate throughout the Sea of Japan. Oil spilled en route to Perevoznaya could potentially reach the Marine Reserve within a matter of hours.
5. The Transneft pipeline, if routed to Perevoznaya, would run along or through two protected land areas in southwest Primorsky Krai: Barsovy Wildlife Refuge and Kedrovaya Pad Nature Preserve. The latter is one of the Russia's oldest preserve and recently became part of UNESCO's "Man and Biosphere" Program.
6. Southwest Primorsky Krai is one of Russia's richest regions in terms of biodiversity: it is home to thirty percent of Russia's endangered "Red List" species, including the Amur leopard, which has been recognized by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as critically endangered. With a remaining population of around 30, the Amur leopard is one of the rarest cats on earth. Negative impacts from an oil pipeline connecting to the terminal in southwest Primorsky Krai, the leopard's only habitat, may well lead to its extinction.
7. Concerns also arise about the current plan to route the pipeline through a highly seismic area north of Siberia's Lake Baikal. In its proposed route through the Severomuisky Range, the pipeline could be ruptured in earthquakes, landslides, mudflows, and other geological events, which would cause both considerable economic losses, as well as irreversible pollution of the Lake Baikal watershed, a UNESCO World Heritage Sitesince 1996.
There are viable alternatives to the current planned route which would mitigate a number of the pipeline's dangers. Nakhodka Bay is the best alternative site for the pipeline terminal.
If the terminal were to be located there:
Nakhodka is an active industrial port with existing oil terminals; locating the Transneft pipeline terminal in the already-developed port of Nakhodka would be more cost-effective than building a new terminal in Perevoznaya.
An important benefit of locating the terminal in Nakhodka is improved safety for oil transportation in the Sea of Japan.
Nakhodka's port does not yet meet best international standards for oil transportation safety. The people of Japan suffered from this when the vessel "Nakhodka" spilled oil near western Japan in 1997. A port with best international safety practices would not have allowed such a decrepit ship to load and transport oil. Nakhodka's port is an accident waiting to happen. The Transneft pipeline will create significant investment for the Nakhodka port that would dramatically improve shipping safety in the entire Sea of Japan.
