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Saturday 20 July 2013

Some words around yesterday's horror story. The "Toxic Tour".

Yesterday we flew into Coca, an "oil" town. First we went to visit an oil separation plant. 

In the first picture you can see the flares burning off the gas from the separation process. The flaring process releases poisons into the atmosphere and I could smell benzine in the air.

The oil is separated into gas, oil and water. Previously the water which is heavilly polluted was discharged into waterways. These separartion facilities were always situated by waterways so that the water could be "flushed" away. You will see in the second picture, a spade full of what we would expect to be earth. It is earth saturated with oil.

The next picture shows Donald taking a "core" sample of "soil" from an area where a family had their drinking water well. They all contracted cancer. 

We then visited Servio, who's family have been decimated by cancer. He showed us his land and made a small hole in the ground to show us the black ooze just underneath the surface. This was an oil pit. Typically every "oil well" had a least 3 pits where raw oil was pumped to ascertain levels of supply.

He showed us another area of his land where an oil pit had been set fire to to reduce levels of crude in the pit. Just below the thin green layer of grass was burnt oil, a black glass like substance, and below that is waste crude oil.

I have never seen such blatant planned disregard for Nature and Human life.  This could be described as both Genocide and Ecocide. The Amazonian ecosystem has been destroyed.

1 comment:

  1. Bernie Briscoe20 July 2013 at 16:53

    This is so sad. Keep up the fight Dave. I will share this as i dont think many people are aware of this devastation to our plants lungs.

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