"It is a question of when, not if, an oil spill will happen on Sakhalin," said Leah Zimmerman, head of Russia programmes at Pacific Environment, a US-based group that monitors ecological threats in the Pacific region.
"Spills can come from extraction wells, subsea pipelines, or a major tanker accident like the Exxon Valdez spill," she said by e-mail, referring to the notorious 1989 spill in Alaska.
Others fear that the Trans-Sakhalin pipeline, which runs underground from northern Sakhalin to Aniva Bay in the south, could leak and spill tonnes of crude oil into rivers where salmon come to spawn.
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