Brazilian chemical spill leaves
500,000 without water
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Washington, DC, Apr. 3 (ENS)— The House Resources Committee passed a bill Wednesday that broadens financial incentives for natural gas, oil, and coal producers, and opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

Republicans on the committee contend that the measures are a vital part of a strategy to revive the American economy, but Democrats say the bill fleeces the nation’s taxpayers and its natural resources.

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Brazilian chemical spill leaves
500,000 without water

By Mario Osava

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Apr. 2 (IPS)— “We’re worse off than in Iraq,” said Joacy Ferreira Gonçalves, president of Fishing Colony V-21, overwrought by the impacts of a chemical spill that has left long stretches of two rivers in southern Brazil contaminated and void of life.

The drama began Saturday when a sedimentation tank ruptured at the Cataguazes pulp and paper company in the town of the same name in Minas Gerais state. At least 20 million liters of chemical waste -- including sulphur, active chloride, and sodium sulphate -- spilled into the Pomba River.

The toxins flowed into the Paraíba do Sul River, one of the country’s major waterways, and half a million people in the central-east region of Minas Gerais and the north of Rio de Janeiro state no longer have potable water services.

The most obvious indications of the disaster are the blackened waters, which emit a repulsive odor and are covered with foam and dead fish.

Sao Fidelis, one of nearly 50 cities affected by the spill, was known as “the land of the freshwater lobster, but now it’s the land of destruction,” lamented Gonçalves, leader of 600 fisherfolk in Colonia V-21 (a designation of the district in which they live).

Now they are wondering how they will survive without the natural life that normally abounds in the local stretch of the Paraíba River.

Biologists and environmental technicians are already predicting that the decontamination of the rivers could take 10 years, given that the toxic substances have impregnated the riverbed and decompose very slowly.

The health of three million people is threatened, says the environmental group Movimento Grito das Aguas, which is dedicated to water issues.

The fishing community of Sao Fidelis “re-populated” the river with fish and freshwater lobsters since 1995, “and now all of that is lost,” said an indignant Gonçalves. Before the disaster, he added, each person could catch up to four kilograms of lobster per day.

The V-21 fisherfolk, however, have enough water to drink, cook, and “bathe like cats” for a week. They began to store water as soon as they heard news of the accident, and before the contaminated water reached Sao Fidelis, he said.

But other municipalities upriver did not have time to take such measures.

Santo Antonio de Padua, for example, “has been without water for four days,” and its 35,000 residents “are living in chaos,” mayor Luiz Fernando Padilha told IPS in a telephone interview.

To ensure that the affected population has water to drink, trucks are being used to distribute the essential liquid to several neighborhoods. The streets are filled with “women and children carrying buckets, a sad spectacle,” said the mayor. Bathing can only be done in neighboring towns that have artesian wells.

Some 300 fisherfolk in Santo Antonio de Padua have lost their source of income for years to come, and the fish farming projects developed over the past 12 years have been destroyed, Padilha said.

“I will have to think about what to do for these people. But right now we have to seek enough water for everyone’s survival,” since the Pomba River, which supplied the city, will remain poisoned for many more days, he said.

Efforts are under way to collect water from nearby streams that have not been contaminated, but this will cover just 20 percent of the normal demand, the mayor noted.

Another impact of the chemical spill is that schools in Santo Antonio were closed, leaving 15,000 students without classes, and many sectors of the economy have shut down.

The Paduana Paper Company, which employs 450 people, halted production, as did 30 rock-mining companies, which together employ more than 1,000 workers.

Padilha and mayors in the surrounding towns also fear that riverside agricultural operations will also be paralyzed. An unknown number of livestock have reportedly died as a result of ingesting contaminated river water.

Campos, the region’s largest city, with 400,000 inhabitants and close to the Paraíba do Sul’s outlet into the Atlantic, kept its irrigation channels closed Tuesday, and water supplies for the local population were cut off Wednesday.

Brazil’s environmental authorities suspended operations at the Cataguazes pulp and paper plant and slapped the firm with a $15 million fine.

The company is a repeat offender. There were protests in many area cities in the 1990s because it dumped its waste directly into the river. Padilha explained that it was then that the firm built the holding tank that ruptured on Saturday.

The pulp and paper industry and the petroleum industry have been responsible for numerous environmental disasters affecting Brazil’s rivers and coastline in the past few years.

“Government regulation is lacking. And shame on the business executives whose only concern is profit,” says the mayor of Santo Antonio de Padua.

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