About 230,000 people live in Ecuador’s northeastern rain forest side by side with oil wells and pools of drilling waste left behind over a period of 40 years by Texaco Inc. and Ecuador’s state-run oil company, PetroEcuador. The pollution has caused one of the worst environmental and human health disasters in the Amazon basin and depending on how an Ecuadorean judge rules in a lawsuit it could result in the costliest corporate ecological catastrophe in world history. If the judge follows the recommendation of a court- appointed panel of experts, he could order Chevron Corp., which now owns Texaco, to pay as much as US$ 27 billion (€ 21 billon) in damages.

For a quarter of a century, until 1990, Texaco discharged 16 billion gallons (60.6 billion litres) of wastewater. From 1990 until 2007, government-owned PetroEcuador released wastewater into the environment. In November 2008, a team of engineers, doctors and biologists submitted a court-ordered report concluding that Texaco’s pollution had caused 2,091 cases of cancer among residents and led to 1,401 deaths from 1985 to 1998.

The panel had previously concluded that Texaco polluted streams and drinking water in a 4,972 square-kilometer area and caused economic and social damage to people who live near the wells.

Related web sites: ChevronToxico - Clean Up Ecuador Campaign ; Chevron Ecuador

Source: Michael Smith and Karen Gullo, Bloomberg, 30 Dec 2008

Tags: latin america & caribbean, water quality, water-related diseases