from HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 19:02
https://sh.itjust.works/post/55851747
Standing on her wooden canoe, a machete in her hand, Yuly Velásquez hacks away at reeds matted with blackened sludge. Close by, a burst oil pipe has released a slick of crude into the San Silvestre wetlands in Barrancabermeja, Colombia’s oil city, choking the water and its wildlife.
“The destruction is immense,” says Velásquez, president of Fedepesan, a sustainable fishing organisation. “For the fish, the animals and flora, it means immediate death.”
With its swamps, lagoons and forests, Barrancabermeja sits in a biodiversity hotspot – the home of endangered river turtles and manatees, and the wetlands act as a corridor for roaming jaguars.
Yet it is also Colombia’s biggest oil town. Gas flares shoot into the sky from a labyrinth of tanks, pipes and chimneys, producing up to 250,000 barrels of crude oil a day and serving 80% of the national demand for fuel.
For decades, this refinery, which is operated by the majority state-owned company Ecopetrol, has also been accused of releasing oil and toxic waste into nearby rivers and wetlands, and of causing leaks that pollute the region’s fishing grounds.
Environmental authorities and residents say the impact has been catastrophic: fish populations have crashed, water quality has deteriorated and numbers of manatees – once regarded as a guardian spirit of the wetlands – are now thought to be on the brink of collapse.
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