There are many residents of the Don Region among the volunteers, including students and staff of the Southern Federal University. Caring residents of our country helped to remove hundreds of tons of polluted sand from the coast, collect fuel oil from the surface of the water, the coastline, wash birds and animals that fell into the disaster zone, and transfer them to a safe place. During this time, a lot of work has been done by all the services involved in eliminating the consequences of the environmental disaster, but the fight against pollution continues.

Volunteers from the Southern Federal University, who took part in the cleanup of the Black Sea coast, told about what is happening in the fuel oil spill zone and how volunteers are helping.

Anastasia Lifenko, a student at the SFedU Institute of Sociology and Regional Studies, took part in the ecological landing from December 24 to December 29.

According to her, the girl went as a volunteer with the team of the Clean Nature center. Free accommodation and meals were provided for them. Their team cleaned the beaches every day, and volunteers from the Rostov region were also on the night shift at the bird wash and in the kitchen, organized for volunteers. Anastasia noted that it was difficult for her, like many young volunteers, because the guys were not physically prepared, but despite all the difficulties, the volunteers did their job properly.

Egor Zhizhko, a master's student at the SFedU Institute of Philology, Journalism and Intercultural Communication, like Anastasia, arrived at the disaster site as part of the volunteer team of the Clean Nature Center. He stayed in the pollution zone for ten days, together with other volunteers, he worked on cleaning the coastal zone from fuel oil.

Maxim Kolesnikov, a student at the SFedU Institute of Computer Technology and Information Security, also volunteered for the eco-training. Instead of New Year's holidays, Maxim and his friends were cleaning fuel oil.

As the volunteer noted, there were many benefits for the volunteers: trips to Anapa and Vityazevo, free housing or with huge discounts, and so on.

On December 30, the volunteers booked round-trip tickets and accommodation in Vityazevo, and on January 3 they started their first shift. "It turned out that on the night of the second to the third of January there was a storm that carried out a large amount of fuel oil on the Boguz spit, in Blagoveshchensk. We didn't even think about it, we went there right away. We arrived and saw that a huge number of volunteers and equipment were working there. We cleaned the beach all day. In the evening, we also wanted to clean the beach in Vityazevo, but we were told that everything was fine there, at least at that time," Maxim continued the story. — The next day, we saw that we needed help at the headquarters where they work with birds. Let's go on the night shift to save the birds. They were instructed and began work on washing birds from fuel oil. This shift started at 00:00 and ended at about 5 a.m. We really liked it, because here you clearly see your advantage when you save a living being. The next night, we returned to the headquarters with the birds. There weren't many "dirty" birds that night, so I decided to "take care" of the people. I worked in the field kitchen, fed all the volunteers and monitored the intake of absorbents so that the guys would not miss and take care of their health."

Other SFedU students, including Yulia Osadchaya, Yulia Alenicheva, Vladislav Panteleeva and many others, also participated as volunteers in the work on cleaning the Black Sea coastal zone from fuel oil. Work to eliminate the consequences of fuel oil pollution in the Black Sea area continues. And the help of volunteers is very necessary and important.