2.5M Acres Of Rainforest Contaminated, Destroyed By Texaco In Ecuador

[hatrack]

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f they do fall seriously ill, they will somehow have to find the money for a proper biopsy and course of treatment in Quito, the Ecuadorian capital, which is an 11 or 12-hour bus ride away. There is no nearer hospital. Most likely, they will go to Quito infrequently or not at all, relying instead on a thinly spread team of local team nurses with only antibiotics and painkillers. Rita Maldonado's grim demeanour is partly, no doubt, prompted by awareness of what might await her. Yet her options are slim-to-non-existent. "We can't go anywhere else," she says plaintively, "because it is contaminated everywhere." Everyone in this part of Ecuador knows people who have died - often in horrible pain - and everyone blames it squarely on the shocking legacy of 20 years of oil exploration by a subsidiary of Texaco, in a joint venture with the Ecuadorian state oil company.

The oilmen dumped their heavy sludge in more than 600 unlined open pits and flushed as much as 20 billion gallons of waste water directly into the area's once pristine rivers and wetlands. Environmentalists estimate that some 2.5 million acres of rainforest - half of the original oil concession, covering an area from just below the Colombian border down to the Napo river, a tributary of the Amazon, and beyond - were either compromised or effectively destroyed in the search for the jungle's very own black gold. The oil executives didn't bother with the now-standard industry practice of re-injecting the waste products into the earth. Even after they pulled out, they bequeathed to the area an infrastructure of outmoded machinery and creaky, rusting pipes prone to further leaks.

Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, which might seem a long time ago. But the devastating impact on the area becomes more apparent with every passing year. "This is as bad as Chernobyl because over time people are getting sicker and sicker," said Nathalie Weemaels, a Belgian agricultural engineer based in Quito who has been very active in resisting oil exploration in the Amazon. "The impact is cumulative - the cancer comes out with time." This is an overwhelmingly agricultural area, where small farmers keep pigs and chickens around their houses and coconuts and starfruit grow in abundance in their gardens. Now the fruit, and the livestock, are as poisoned as the humans. Animals and, occasionally, children, stumble into the waste pits. The produce is as suspect as the water supply. Sometimes, when locals cut open slaughtered animals in preparation for cooking, they say they can smell the hydrocarbon fumes on the raw flesh.

Texaco's experience in Ecuador has become notorious in the oil industry for a couple of reasons. First, because it has become a textbook case of how not to go about extracting energy resources from an area of Third World wilderness. And second, because it has become the subject of an extraordinary lawsuit that started in US courts more than a decade ago and has now moved to Ecuador, where the authorities are slowly gathering evidence of contamination at more than 120 wells and sludge pits and listening to arguments from the two sides on the validity and competence of their respective scientific studies."

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=633329

[stopbush]

1. That's 2.5MM acres. You forgot a thousand multiplier in your

subject line.

2.5M = 25,000 acres.

2.5MM = 25,000,000 acres