The ministry's statement reached the wires at 17:41 Moscow time through Interfax, a day after the event and about two hours after the desk's evening sweep had found no suspension. It names the day, Tuesday, and the two moorings; it gives no clock for the stop or the restart and does not say how long tankers waited. “After the necessary checks of the CPC loading systems and the tankers, no findings were identified that would affect further loading operations. No environmental impact was recorded. Loading operations resumed in normal mode”, the ministry said, in Interfax's rendering.
Tuesday's incident sits inside the wave that struck Novorossiysk from Tuesday evening through the night: 4 dead including a child and 29 injured by the governor's count, a fuel-oil terminal alight in the port, 596 drones over 12 regions and the Black Sea by the defence ministry's 12-hour tally. The consortium's terminal, the export point for more than 80% of Kazakhstan's oil, lies west of the city.
Tuesday's incident produced a statement from a Kazakh ministry and none from the consortium.
The fire at the fuel-oil terminal now has figures from Reuters, which two sources gave the agency on Wednesday and The Moscow Times relayed: a tank of about 37,000 cubic metres caught fire at a terminal that handles about 5 million tonnes a year, 400,000 to 450,000 tonnes a month, with 119,000 cubic metres of tank capacity and a loading rate of 2,500 cubic metres an hour. The terminal did not answer Reuters' request for comment. An industry directory, energybase.ru, gives the same tank farm a throughput of 0.54 million tonnes a year; the two figures differ by a factor of 9, and this text carries the agency's.
By day the defence ministry counted 108 drones over 15 regions and the Black Sea between 08:00 and 20:00 on Wednesday, Krasnodar Krai among the regions; EADaily relayed the list at 01:00. The night tally for Wednesday to Thursday had not appeared in the channels CAW reads by 07:45 Moscow time.
The consortium's record of the summer is on its Telegram channel: attacks on tankers in July, transshipment resumed on 27 July, a third attack on 30 July as its last operational post, and since then safety-culture items, the latest announcing the 14th CPC Safety Day in Astana on Wednesday. Tuesday's incident produced a statement from a Kazakh ministry and none from the consortium.
Loading at the terminal had stopped before by the Kazakh side's own decision, from 20 to 27 July and again on 30 July, Kommersant recalled on Wednesday. The ministry's Tuesday statement describes a stop and a restart without a clock. The consortium's July loading total is still unpublished.