South African Oil Spill Pollutes Rich Whites’ Playground
Weekend Edition January 23-25, 2015
But Suburban Durban’s Disaster Reveals Wider Planetary Abuse and Eco-racism
South African Oil Spill Pollutes Rich Whites’ Playground
by PATRICK BOND
Over the holiday season, the front pages of the newspapers in Durban – South Africa’s third-largest city – screamed out again and again about a diesel spill. In the suburb of Hillcrest on December 23, a Durban-Johannesburg pipeline operated by the giant parastatal firm Transnet gushed 220 000 liters into wealthy white residents’ gardens.
The pipeline, built in 1965 and now at least four years past its official retirement date, annually carries three billion litres of petroleum products for BP, Shell and Malaysian-owned Engen. An anonymous company source confirmed to The Witness newspaper, “The underground pipe had burst along a weld line which had given way.” A Transnet spokesperson confessed that the Hillcrest clean-up would take “close to a year.”
Look more closely at the damage and how it might have been prevented. Not only should this become a case for rethinking both our addiction to climate-destroying fossil fuels and the Johannesburg region’s geographical illogicality and excessive air pollution.
Those were points made back in 2008 by one of the country’s finest civil society groups, the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), when they predicted this sort of incident based on experiences with multinational corporations at Africa’s largest oil refinery site. In 2001, one pipeline used by Shell and BP spilled of 1.3 million liters of oil in the South Durban Bluff neighbourhood (disclosure: this is where I live).
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/23/south-african-oil-spill-pollutes-rich-whites-playground/
