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Members of various environmental organisations scooped dead ducks out of a creek outside Moscow polluted by an oil spill from a nearby power plant that is threatening to spread and contaminate drinking water. The spill leaked into the Dulov Creek in the Korolev region on Sunday (January 5) after an oil cistern on the territory of a research and production association linked to Russia's Space Agency de-pressurised. The environmental group WWF said authorities downplayed its size and accused them of wasting vital time in cleaning up the mess. "If we don't clean it up, it will take decades for this to go away. And a number of factors can make it worse, the temperature for instance, the warmer it is the faster the oil decomposes and unfortunately with these low temperatures the oil does not decompose at all," said Olga Pegova, a member of WWF. WWF said that ice is preventing the oil from seeping into the River Klyazma, the main water source for thousands of people living to the east of Moscow, into which the Dulov Creek flows. In November, a storm smashed an oil tanker near Russia's Black Sea coast, spilling hundreds of tonnes of oil which coated thousands of birds in thick sludge. The spill near Moscow is smaller, but WWF estimate it still measures around 500 tonnes. A senior official from Moscow's emergencies department said the spill had been controlled. "This is not an ecological disaster," Oleg Lomakin, first deputy chief for Moscow emergency department, said. "It was a technological incident." Volunteers were less worried about giving the spill the right name, and focussed their attention on cleaning and rescuing birds instead. "Of course, it is a pity we heard about this disaster so late. We know there was a flock of about seventy ducks living here, we don't know what happened to them. We hope most of them flew away, but yesterday we found twenty five ducks who were already beyond rescue," said Sergei Gladyshev, deputy head of a bird clinic called Green Parrot. Environmentalists said officials has showed no willingness to launch an appropriate clean up and rescue operation.