Green | December 30, 2008 | 4 comments

Texaco's toxic past in Amazon haunts Chevron as $27 billion judgment looms

source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a_lJWUAmsu8c&refer=home

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tbowman131
As oil executives ring in the new year by counting their record shattering profits, we need to remember what they did to get there. This is just one of the more glaring examples ...

"Bolivar Cevallos walks around the farm where his family once lived amid the oil fields of Ecuador’s Amazon rain forest. His boots sink ankle deep in tar. Everywhere he steps, oily muck seeps from the ground.

A gasolinelike smell hangs in the sweltering jungle air. The mess is a remnant of oil drilling in a 120-mile-long swath of the tropical jungle in northeastern Ecuador where Texaco Inc. and Ecuador’s state-run oil company, PetroEcuador, have pumped billions of barrels of crude from the ground during the past 40 years.

Cevallos, 51, whose face is tanned and creased from a life working in the tropical sun, plunges a shovel into a ditch. Grease oozes out and drains into a river his family used for drinking and bathing for more than 25 years.

About 230,000 people live in Ecuador’s northeastern rain forest side by side with oil wells and pools of drilling waste. Cevallos is no longer one of them.

Four years ago, a doctor diagnosed his daughter, Diana, with histiocytosis X, a rare blood disease that caused tumors that punched holes in her skull.

“The doctor told us to get out because the pollution would make her sicker, maybe kill her,” says Cevallos, who used to tend patches of cacao on his farm and now works as a laborer on a construction site for $6 a day. His daughter, now 5, is thin and still ailing."

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4 comments // Texaco's toxic past in Amazon haunts Chevron as $27 billion judgment looms

  • hydrokat
    • 0
      hydrokat  

    • The Oil pigs must be held accountable for their continued uncontrolled Pollution of Developing Nations and The World. The reason they left the U.S. was clearly to sidestep Laws which sought to put a muzzle them, and they are not finished here in the U.S. Fossil Fuels are a dangerous and are no longer viable. But the Gas Pigs need it and won't stop until every drop has been sucked up

    • 3 years ago
  • pjacobs51
  • JackHerer
    • 0
      JackHerer  
    • Image

    • Phytoremediation: Using Plants to Clean Soil

      In 1998, Phytotech, along with Consolidated Growers and Processors (CGP) and the Ukraine's Institute of Bast Crops, planted industrial hemp, Cannabis sp., for the purpose of removing contaminants near the Chernobyl site. Cannabis is in the Cannabidaceae family and is valuable for its fiber, which is used in ropes and other products. This industrial variety of hemp, incidentally, has only trace amounts of THC, the chemical that produces the "high" in a plant of the same genus commonly known as marijuana.

      Overall, phytoremediation has great potential for cleaning up toxic metals, pesticides, solvents, gasoline, and explosives. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that more than 30,000 sites in the United States alone require hazardous waste treatment. Restoring these areas and their soil, as well as disposing of the wastes, are costly projects, but the costs are expected to be reduced drastically if plants provide the phytoremediation results everyone is hoping for.

    • 3 years ago
  • judyroo
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