outdoors

Veil of secrecy over Bocas oil spill

On February 4 one of the crude oil tanks at the Petroterminales de Panama terminal at Chiriqui Grande on the Bocas del Toro mainland sprung a leak --- the company isn't saying precisely what happened but the Panama Maritime Authority (AMP) says it was a ruptured valve --- and teams from Ocean Pollution Control SA were called in to limit and clean up the mess.

A lot of the thick, six-kilometer oil slick was recovered and put back into the Petroterminales storage tanks but a lot of it wasn't, and now some of the neighbors are complaining that their fishing livelihoods have been destroyed for years, that they're getting sick from the noxious fumes.

It will be sometime in April before the cleaning job is done and years before the wildlife in the area comes back like it was before. Meanwhile, the company and the neighbors are giving out different versions of how big the oil slick was and the AMP has opened a file for citizen complaints.

The environmentalist group Oilwatch called oil spills "part of the community's natural history since the Petroterminales de Panama storage tank park was installed on the coast" and characterized the situation as "worrisome" in light of plans to expand the facility. Originally built in the 1970s as part of a pipeline to take Alaskan oil across the isthmus and to ports on the East and Gulf coasts of the USA, now there is talk about rehabilitating the pipeline and reversing its flow so that it can be used to ship Venezuelan oil to China. That would entail more oil coming through Chiriqui Grande and a greater risk of spills.

Photo courtesy of Oilwatch Panama

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