Two weeks after the Repsol oil spill in the sea off the central coast of Peru, biologists and engineers from public and independent entities have poured into the area to rescue the fauna and assess the impact of pollution in the regions of Lima and Callao, including two nature reserves. The affected area is, according to the Government, about 11,900 barrels of crude oil, although the company claims that it is 1,500 less. The head of the protected natural areas service, José Ramírez Maldonado, has assured that “the damage is incalculable” and a report from an interdisciplinary mission of the College of Engineers describes the situation as an “active disaster” that affects the mortality of birds and mammals.
One of the conclusions of the report by the College of Engineers – following the visit of 12 experts a week after the spill – is that the environmental impacts on marine and coastal geology present a “very high” uncertainty regarding their effects on the medium long term. The environmental authority has informed this newspaper that until January 25, 11,637 hectares of sea and coastline were contaminated, that is, more than 116 million square meters.
Of these, 512 hectares belong to a national reserve of islands where birds that produce guano, a natural fertilizer, live, and 1,758 hectares correspond to the Ancón Reserved Zone, according to the service of protected natural areas. Pocitas beach, in the Ancón Reserved Zone, is one of the most affected by the spill and is therefore one of the points where rescue efforts are concentrated. Last Friday, the authority of the protected natural areas reported that until that day the State teams had removed 5,000 gallons of oil from that bay.
The other fauna rescue site is located about 40 kilometers north of Lima. “We have recorded ten dead birds on the Pescadores islet every day since January 18 when we went out to the field: chuitas, cormorants, guanay, boobies and penguins,” reported biologist Deyvis Huamán, a specialist in the management of protected natural areas. The biologist warns that another of the affected species is the sea otter. “It is an endangered species, and if otters die from the effects of oil contamination, we could speak of a local extinction,” he stressed last Friday.
Traumatologist Juan Carlos Pedraza went last week with his wife Eva Portocarrero, a medical technologist, to one of the affected spas to help wildlife service workers. When he was walking between some rocks, he saw an intoxicated bird, a guanay. “I approached and grabbed her by the neck and with the other hand of the beak so that she would not attack me. Her plumage was full of that toxic oily stuff. We took her to the group that was just getting ready to go in search of the animals. I climbed up the rocks that were caked with oil and so without protection I launched myself to rescue her; when I approached her, she did not try to run away, she was very weak, ”he describes on WhatsApp.
the marine ecosystem
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Biologist Yuri Hooker, one of the first to arrive at the contaminated beaches in the first week of the disaster, specified that only about ten otters lived in that area, according to data from veterinarian Carlos Calvo, and they would have already died. “The Peruvian coast is arid but it has an extremely productive sea due to the mass of plankton; A few kilometers north of the start of the spill, a rocky area begins with several inlets and is the habitat of otters, Humboldt penguins, cheetahs, and cormorants, among other seabirds”, he describes.
The biologist warns that there are areas of the sea where a thin layer of fuel can be seen, but warns that in other parts, where it is not visible to the naked eye, shellfish are also affected. “It is an area of great abundance of pejerrey, an important species for feeding seabirds and for artisanal fishing,” explains Hooker.
According to the biologist, the invertebrate fish are not going to die now, but they are breathing contaminated water. “The toxins will accumulate in organisms like sea urchins, mussels, shellfish,” he adds. The fishing engineer Elmer Nieves also referred to this problem: “There are oil components that dissolve in the water and fall to the bottom and these filtering species quickly absorb these chemicals,” he explained in a virtual conversation last Wednesday, after having visited area.
This week, the Ministry of the Environment announced the suspension of the Repsol company’s hydrocarbon loading and unloading operations at sea “until it provides technical guarantees that another spill will not occur,” a decision that has been branded of “disproportionate and unreasonable” by the company. According to the company, the spill was caused by the “anomalous waves” produced by the eruption of an underwater volcano in Tonga, a version that has been denied by the Peruvian Navy and by witnesses who were in the sea at that time. On the other hand, the oil company reported on Sunday that it was sending more equipment to clean the contaminated areas, such as 30 skimmers, a kind of pump that sucks up hydrocarbons.
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