The owner of the ship, the Brussels-based European Dredging Company, decided to hand over more than 120 tons of fuel oil to the town's boiler plants, the spokesperson said.
Disposal of oily water currently held in the ship's tanks, however, presents a much more difficult problem. Engineers need to pump out more than 400 cubic meters of water polluted with varying amounts of fuel oil, Colonel Mikhail Sitnikov, the head of Kholmsk's civil defense and emergencies office, told journalists. 182 cubic meters of such water has been pumped out of the Cristoforo Colombo's tanks over the past 24 hours.
On Friday, the federal judge of the Kholmsk municipal court dismissed the application filed by the local prosecutor overseeing environmental protection in the area who demanded that the ship's skipper Nicolas Verbreken be taken into custody. The latter, suspected of committing a crime through negligence, returned aboard Cristoforo Colombo after spending two days in a solitary confinement cell of the local pre-trial detention center.
In the meantime, investigators continue their probe into the case.
The ship was thrown on the reefs some 50 meters off the shore in the harbor of the port of Kholmsk by the Songda typhoon on September 8. The shipwreck entailed a spill of about 200 tons of fuel oil which polluted the harbor waters and a vast length of Kholmsk's coastline.
The spokesperson for the emergency center said that by Saturday, September 25, the coastline had been fully cleared of the oil fuel pollution.
A tentative estimate shows that the Russian side has suffered damages totaling over 57 million rubles (about $2 million).
