Oil spill affects the Amazon

Puerto Maderos – There is oil in the water, on the rocks and in the sand where children normally play on the banks of the Coca River in Ecuador.

Residents of Puerto Maderos make no effort to hide their anger at the latest crude spill to hit the Ecuadoran Amazon.

“This damage is not for a month, two months... it will be 20 years” before it returns to normal, said Bolivia Buenano, a merchant from the area about 120km from where the spill occurred.

Buenano joined a cleanup crew put together by oil transport company OCP, whose pipeline was responsible for the leak, to bring some relief to the community of 700-odd people.

No one can “bathe normally in the river, nor drink from here, there is no fish, there is nothing,” she exclaimed while scrubbing a polluted containment buoy.

Buenano complained about a lack of state investment in the Amazon provinces, which hold much of the country’s oil wealth but are most affected by industrial disasters such as this one.

Yesterday, almost 6 300 barrels of oil leaked into an environmental reserve in Ecuador’s east, when heavy rains caused a boulder to fall on a pipeline.

Cesar Benalcazar was one of several people who rushed to the scene to stem the flow of oil.

“We tried to stop the crude from reaching the river, but the slope made it descend like a waterfall,” said Benalcazar.

OCP has said more than 84% of the crude has been recovered.

But not before about 21 000m2 of the Cayambe-Coca nature reserve were polluted and crude flowed into the Coca River – one of the largest in the Ecuadoran Amazon and an important source for many riverbank communities.

Rains and currents spread the stain for many miles.

“We are tired because this is not a normal life. Nature is not healthy, it is contaminated,” said Buenano.

“And this will continue as long as the pipeline and the crude oil network continue.”

In 2020, a mudslide damaged pipelines that spilled about 15 000 barrels of oil into three Amazon basin rivers, affecting several communities.

Crude petroleum is Ecuador’s biggest export product.

Between January and November 2021, the country extracted 494 000 barrels per day. –