by CKR
Back in December, the New York Times and International Herald Tribune published an article by Dan Bilefsky on Sillamäe, Estonia, and its development into a port. I pointed out some errors in that story. I see now, in the archived NYT version (subscription only), that one of those errors has been corrected: Ivangorod is not visible, “sparkling in a haze across the Baltic Sea,” from Sillamäe. I’ll stand by the other corrections I offered.
[I sent a link to my earlier post to the NYT ombudsman and received nothing, mitte midagi, in return. I’ll do the same with this one.]
I recognize that most reporters can’t spend a week in Ida-Virumaa county, as I just did. But telephones, maps, and the internet exist. The NYT’s inability to get this story right shows some of the problems of intelligence gathering. Formulating the right questions is essential. If this is the best the International Herald Tribune and the NYT can do for an open port in an open country, we need to think very, very carefully about what the media are saying about Iran.
In a couple of sentences, here’s Bilefsky’s article: Former secret city Sillamäe is trying to develop a port for shipment of Chinese and other goods to the West. Its past is a drag, and there are other problems.
I think the news is in a different story: Former Soviet citizens living in Estonia have faced language problems and lack of jobs since the fall of the Soviet Union. Estonia is trying to turn an environmental and social liability into jobs and a better life for those people through the development of a port.
Some of my boosterism would be balanced by some of what was in the Times story. But the NYT article is not without a viewpoint. So let’s look at what Bilefsky could have learned.
First, who is Dan Bilefsky? A Google search lists articles for the International Herald Tribune on European issues. I couldn’t find a biography or resume, and the Times is famously protective of their reporters’ receiving unwanted e-mail. A correction in the Times identifies him as a “contributing reporter” and says that he was in Brussels, not Minsk. And I suspect not Sillamäe, either. The Times prints his articles regularly.
Bilefsky could have started by consulting a map. The Perry-Casteñeda Collection provides this map, which it identifies as being from the CIA. It shows both Sillamäe and Ivangorod, in the northeast.
Googling Sillamae (you can do it without the dieresis) gives over a million hits. That’s a problem, so we’ll need to cut it down by adding “port,” the subject of the article. Ah, this gets it down to 12,000. And right there on the first Google page, the third entry says that half the port belongs to Russians! That placement changes, so it may not be the same when you click my link, and it may have been different when Bilefsky wrote his article.
Now let’s try “Sillamae uranium.” That gets it down to 381, many of which look interesting. I’m a little disappointed that my book shows up only as number 20, but it’s a few years old now. I will write more about nuclear Sillamäe in another post.
Most of the links on the first few Google pages are in English, easily accessible sources that Bilefsky could have used, even if he stayed in Brussels.
Let me now add what I’ve learned on this trip.
Anyone who has been near a railway in Estonia has seen the long oil trains from Russia. Russia wants to sell more oil to the United States. A pipeline to Murmansk has been proposed, where the oil could be loaded on tankers to cross the Atlantic. I can’t find much recent on the pipeline on Google, and it may well be that Yukos’s problems will delay its construction.
Sillamäe will be able to handle the largest oil tankers, and it is being prepared to handle the oil, along with bulk chemicals. Bilefsky’s story almost ignores this aspect, which is likely to be the largest volume initially.
The single largest financial interest in the Port of Sillamäe is Russian. This suggests that although there will be competition with Russian ports, there is no special Russian interest in Sillamäe’s failure. The plight of the Russians living in Ida-Virumaa county is frequently used for propaganda purposes by Moscow, and if the port fails, they will remain unemployed. That small interest in a continuing propaganda war is likely to be overshadowed by Russian financial interests in moving oil and the success of the port for other Russian commerce.
Russians also own the largest share of Silmet, the successor to the uranium processing plant, which produces rare earth metals, niobium, and tantalum, used in steel and electronics. Silmet will benefit from proximity to the port.
The development of the port was made possible by the stabilization and entombing of the tailings pond from the uranium processing plant. This is being managed by ÖkoSil, owned by Silmet and the Estonian government. The EU and the countries around the Baltic Sea have helped to finance the cleanup, which should be completed next year.
I see that Bilefsky gets this wrong, too, in a paragraph that's included in the IHT article but not in the NYT. Twelve tons isn't much. A ton of sand is about a square meter. The tailings pond holds 1200 tons of uranium alone, which may be the number Bilefsky was misquoting. The total volume of waste is about 6 million cubic meters, so the mass is about six million tons. The remediation consisted of driving pilings to support the dam, not building a wall, and covering the tailings with what is called an engineered cover consisting of layers of rock, sand, clay, and soil. No concrete in it, hardly the fifty meters Bilefsky quotes.
The port, in fact, extends from the remediated tailings pond. Storage and loading facilities are being built outside the remediated area, so that there is no danger of their opening up the contaminated material.
Bilefsky is correct in saying that ground transport is a problem.
The Russian-Estonian border also is plagued by congestion.The problem is that the border crossing is in central Narva, an older city with narrow streets. There is plenty of room north of the city for a modern border (and Narva River) crossing, with access to Highway 1/E20 on the Estonian side. The EU has committed to funding a highway and the Estonian part of the bridge and border crossing. Russia is not adverse to the development, although they have not yet moved to planning and funding.
Bilefsky makes much of Sillamäe’s secret past.
''I wouldn't want to go there,'' said Sven Ratassepp, marketing manager of the Port of Tallinn, Sillamae's rival. ''Sillamae is an ugly town and it was a closed city for years. Not many people really know what went on there.''Marketing manager for a rival port, hey? No bias there.
The citizens of Kotka, Finland, across the Gulf of Finland from Sillamäe, have a different view. They wanted to participate in Sillamäe’s development, and a ferry will begin a regular run between Kotka and Sillamäe this month.
Kaasik tells me that employment is up in the area because of the port and a new lead-recovery factory that is receiving car batteries for recycle from Finland, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Other businesses are being sought for the industrial area.
Now Tiit Vähi knows all this, and Bilefsky seems to have interviewed him for the article. What questions did Bilefsky ask? Or did he start with preconceived notions that filtered what Vähi had to say? Did Bilefsky check any of the information available online? Or did he think that he knew it all? Those are some of the things that can go wrong with information-gathering. I thought they taught that in journalism school.
Photos all by CKR.
First photo: A windmill, the new oil storage tanks and stacks of the Silmet plant from the coast road.
Second photo: The Port of Sillamäe.
Third photo: the remediated tailings pond (mound) and port.
Last: Sillamäe - Kotka schedule folder.
Many thanks to PHK for using her NYT subscription to dig out the NYT article. Much of my information is from ÖkoSil, and I thank Tõnis Kaasik for a tour of the site.