Oil Spill in Desaguadero: the Increase and Growth of Oil Disasters | Amazon Watch
Amazon Watch

Oil Spill in Desaguadero: the Increase and Growth of Oil Disasters

February 16, 2000 | NOTICIAS FOBOMADE

Economic, social, environmental and cultural impacts of oil company activities in Bolivia are increasingly negative and growing. This situation can firstly be attributed to the control and environmental checks on oil company activities by the responsible government agents, in particular the Vice Ministry of Hydrocarbons, is practically non-existent. Secondly, the oil companies working in the country are motivated exclusively by profits, using their economic might to easily evade legal regulations and technical requirements instated to protect the environment. In the past few months, accidents and denoucements are on the increase, like the case of the Madrejones well that burnt for more than three months while the oil company Pluspetrol did little to attempt to put it out, and continues to dump highly contaminated water, gases and oil in a radius of 6 km before the passive watch of the Vice Ministry of Hydrocarbons that has resisted to apply punitive measures for the utilization of necessary technology to control the accident and doesn’t realize an evaluation of the damages, nor impose warnings or sanctions.

In other news, the construction of the Cuiaba gas pipeline has not been followed up other than the organized and paid visits by the Shell, Enrol, and Transredes consortium whose environmental impact study was rejected by the financing organization, making fools of the government agents that had approved the study. The denouncements of the inhabitants of Ipa-Villamontes against the contamination of the river heads of the Ipa river in the mountaneous region of Aguarague, proposed as a national park, did not succeed in even securing the presence of the officials of Hydrocarbons in the area. In this regard a series of denouncments coming from the amazonian region and the tropical region of Cochabamba have not received a reply on those impacts, without major evaluation, have been classified as passive environmental effects to be assumed by the state. The ecological disaster caused by the rupture of the Sica Sica-Arica pipeline, in the Desaguadero river, belonging to the Titicaca-PoopÛ-Coipasa watershed in the Bolivian Altiplano, is a patent of the state of inexistent socio-environmental control and study. The previous pipeline operated under high risk conditions well known by Transredes (ENRON/SHELL), without major technical-environmental control. Faced with the disaster, the company has directed its actions toward cleaning its image as it is in the process of negotiating a loan from the B.I.D. for the construction of a new oil pipeline to the city of Yacuiba to transport argentinian oil to Cuiab·. The contamination of Desaguadero is more a consequence of the politics of resource exploitation without socio-environmental considerations and demonstrates the failure of the capitalization process to attract investors with state of the art technology and adequate environmental practices.

For this reason, the FOBOMADE proposal is oriented towards training in the areas of monitoring and invesgitation in the local communities. In the seminar organized by Caritas-Oruro on the 16th of February, the Orurian Forum questioned the fact that the company Transredes and the organizations that work for it, pretend that the oil spill was an accident or an act of God. An accident implies the actualization of a present danger or risk, in so far as it is preventable and supposes responsability: the lack of preparation of the company to prevent it. It is maintained that the impacts of the damage caused are defined by the magnitude of the oil spill, which in turn is defined by the volume of the spill and the composition of the oil.

Volume Issues: Initially there was talk of 10,000 barrels, later of 5,000. Actually the company maintains that the spill was less than 2,000 barrels. The government does not know. If one considers the duration of the spill, between 22 and 32 hours, taking into account the total capacity of the pump (10,000 barrels/per day) and the average of the pump (5,000 barrels/per day), this gives us a spill quantity between 6600 and 10,000 barrels. Any quantity less than this amount would signify that the pipeline was under utilized, a position that would be uneconomical. Moreover, in order for the pipeline to be damaged there must exist high levels of pressure within the pipe.

Composition of the Crude: This information is crucial to determine how aggresive and damaging is the crude. Because of its importance, this information has been keep highly secret. The only information divulged refers that 60% of the spilt material corresponds to reduced crude and 40% to gasoline. Reduced crude is the residual of the first distillation in a refinery. The heavier elements are the (olefinas) and the aromatic compounds, that are highly aggresive and contain a high incidence of solubility. The aromatic compounds are derived from (benceno) that is carcenogenic.

The question: Why has information about the composition of the crude not been given if the analysis can be performed in local laboratories? Why wait that they send results from the United States? The toxicity of many elements in an enviroment like that of Oruro is much more toxic than at sea level. Moreover, there exist compounding effects with salinity that persists for a great deal of time. Cool temperatures also play a role in the degradation process, slowing it down. The short term visible effects are perhaps becoming less obvious but the long term ones must be endured and will linger for much longer.

Those principally affected are the Aymara communities that inhabit the limits of the principal waterway of Lake Titicaca. The company, warned about the operation of the pipeline since November 1999 by the Super Intendant of Security, left the oil spill to continue for 32 hours and only 8 days afterwords began to take repatory measures. Recently, in the Bay of Guabara in Brazil, there was an oil spill of 1,200,000 litres of oil of the Petrobras company. The company paid US$ 48/per day for hired fishermen to clean the waste, covered all the costs of the clean up and received a fine for the ecological damage of 20 million dollars. Transredes spilled between one million and one and a half million litres of oil, that is to say a spill similar or larger than the one in Brazil and has yet to be sanctioned. Clean the contamination or clean your image?

The company works on two levels:
– Media control
– Compensation and division

Transredes claims to have brought 200 experts from North America, to apply state of the art technology that results in cleaning by hand, with nets and bags using lay people and soldiers dressed in white. Does this work require 200 American experts? In the right branch of the Desaguadero river, a flooded and inaccessible area the clean work has not begun. No government study exists, therefore civil society organizations together with those affected are organizing to perform independent monitoring and to confront divisionist strategies perpetrated by the oil company on the community, in the extent of highering a team of anthropologists that work to eliminate any conflict, meanwhile the oil company penetrates the soils and has destroyed the agricultural year for thousands of families living in the Bolivian Altiplano.

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