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Photos taken from the drone, released last week by a blogger who wrote about travel on Instagram, show a bright orange landscape near a disused copper sulfide mine near the town of Lovič in the Urals.
“The Bajo Tagil District Prosecutor’s Office has begun to inspect a facility that handles wastewater from the Lovič mine,” Marina Kanatova told AFP.
The mine “is flooded and acid rivers are now flowing from it, poisoning everything in its path,” blogger zamkad_life said in the photos.
The videos posted to his account show orange streams flowing in various directions through a wooded area.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office said the specialists “would take samples and determine if the acidic mine water is being managed according to the rules.”
Environmentalist Andrei Volegov, who runs the local NGO Ekopravo, wrote on the social network Facebook that the contaminated water had to be neutralized in a technical “storage facility”, but during the rains the storage facility overflowed and its contents spilled .
A. Volegov reported such a situation to the prosecutor’s office last year and received a response that the responsible company does not have enough funds and cannot buy enough lime to neutralize the acid, according to a letter published by him.
According to local media, the Sverdlovsk regional government has called for the mine to be isolated, but Moscow has refused to do so, saying there are still valuable resources there.
Last month, large fuel spills in the Arctic drew attention to industrial pollution in Russia, where companies often face only small fines, and hazardous waste can be neglected for many years due to bureaucratic obstacles.
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