MOSCOW (Reuters):

A severe storm broke a small Russian oil tanker in two off the Ukrainian port of Kerch yesterday, spilling up to 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil in what a Russian official said was an "environmental disaster."

The same storm in the Black Sea and Azov Sea also sank four freighters, three carrying sulphur and one with a cargo of scrap metal. The heavy seas also cracked the hull of another oil tanker, but the ship remained afloat and not leaking.

The sunken tanker, Volganeft-139, had travelled from the Russian port of Azov and was anchored outside Kerch in Ukraine's eastern Crimea to ride out the weather, when high waves broke its back at around 0445 (0145 GMT) yesterday, media reported.

The 1978-built tanker, designed primarily for inland and coastal service, was carrying 4,000 tonnes of fuel oil in total when it was hit by the storm, which has knocked out electricity supplies to much of Crimea.

Crew members safe

"This problem may take a few years to solve. Fuel oil is a heavy substance and it is now sinking to the seabed," Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of Russia's environment agency, Rosprirodnadzor, told state-run Vesti-24 television channel. "This is a very serious environmental disaster."

Environment agency Rosprirod-nadzor said some 2,000 tonnes of fuel oil had spilt, but Emergencies Ministry spokesman, Viktor Beltsov, told Reuters that not more than 1,200 tonnes had leaked.

The tanker's 13 crew members drifted for hours in waves of up to six metres high aboard the ship's stern before beaching safely a few miles from the bow section, the Emergencies Ministry said. The crew were safe, it added.

The likely effects of the spill were not immediately clear. A spill over 700 tonnes is considered large, but the biggest ones run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands.