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MOSCOW, Nov. 12 — An environmental disaster began to unfold in southern Russia on Monday as tens of thousands of oil-slicked seabirds and globules of heavy oil dotted the shoreline, a day after at least 11 ships, including a small oil tanker, sank or broke apart in a fierce storm, Russian officials said.

Three bodies washed ashore, and 20 sailors were missing when searches were called off late Monday because of rough weather, the news agency Interfax reported, citing officials with the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. But officials added that any survivors were at risk of freezing to death before they could be found.

A local official, Alexander Tkachyov, governor of the Krasnodar region, said 30,000 seabirds were covered with oil and would probably die, Interfax said. The World Wide Fund for Nature, a conservation group, said the heavy fuel oil also settled onto the seabed, surely destroying marine habitat and killing fish.

The tanker, Volganeft-139, split apart as it was pounded by 18-foot waves in the Kerch Strait which links the Sea of Azov with the Black Sea, a strategic pathway for oil exported by tanker from Russia and the Caspian basin to Europe. Its 13 crew members were rescued, but 1,300 tons of heavy, viscous oil — the equivalent of 560,000 gallons — were discharged into the sea.

“The environmental system of the region has sustained serious damage,” said Aleksey Zimenko, a conservationist with the World Wide Fund for Nature, according to Interfax. “The consequences will persist for many years to come.”

The Russian authorities said captains disregarded storm warnings, but survivors said the seas picked up suddenly and little could be done.

“The waves were too high, so we could not lift the anchor,” one rescued sailor said glumly in an interview on RTR television from a hospital bed in Taman, in southern Russia. “Everything happened instantly. We listed, and then we sank.”

Viktor P. Beltsov, a spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations, speaking in a telephone interview, blamed the captains and ship owners for the disaster. “They all knew perfectly well a storm warning was in effect,” he said. “The leadership of these companies simply ignored these warnings.”

Russian prosecutors said they would open a criminal investigation to assess responsibility for the environmental damage.

But the World Wide Fund for Nature said in a statement that the problem ran deeper than errors in judgment by the ships’ captains, citing the Russian practice of using river tankers, like Volganeft-139, on the open sea in rough weather.

“It’s a systemic problem,” the group said. “Most river tankers simply are not constructed for such storms, and the seagoing vessels cannot sail on the Don and Volga Rivers.”

The statement said the accident, the first significant maritime oil spill in Russia during the current oil boom, should impel the country to adopt more stringent laws on tanker traffic, noting that laws requiring double-hulled tankers were introduced in the United States after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

Far less oil spilled in this incident than in the sinking of a tanker off the coast of Spain in 2002, when 63,000 tons of oil were discharged, destroying marine life and fouling numerous beaches. But the quantity of oil spilled can sometimes be less important than the location of the accident. The spill on Sunday, in a relatively narrow body of water and close to the shoreline, had the potential to be particularly harmful.

Oil spills from pipelines on land are common in Russia. The country, the world’s second largest oil exporting nation after Saudi Arabia, maintains a vast terrestrial pipeline network tying Siberian fields with refineries as far away as Poland.



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