ENVIRONMENT-ARGENTINA: Resort Town Still Reeling from Oil Spill

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 16 2002 (IPS) - The inflow of weekend and summer visitors to the colonial-era coastal resort town of Magdalena in eastern Argentina has not yet recovered from an early 1999 oil spill by a tanker belonging to transnational oil giant Shell.

”Major damage was caused by the oil spill, and experts say that if the necessary recovery efforts are not made, it could take between 50 and 80 years for the ecosystem to return to equilibrium,” Magdalena Mayor Juan Sibetti told IPS.

Magdalena, a town of 16,700, is located in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, around 100 kms south of the capital on the coast of the Rio de la Plata. The seat of government of a mainly agricultural region, the town was founded five centuries ago, and the coastal areas and colonial-era architecture make it a favourite for tourists and vacationers.

The town is located at one end of the 40-km long Parque Costero del Sur (Coastal Park of the South) along the Rio de la Plata, declared a biosphere reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The park’s subtropical flora and fauna were also affected by the oil spill, but to a lesser extent.

Magdalena’s river resort area draws many weekend visitors, largely from Buenos Aires, a city of 12 million. ”In the summer, between 7,000 and 10,000 people used to come every weekend, and now less than 3,000 visit,” said Sibetti. The reduced flow of vacationers has hurt the sales of tourism-related products and services, as well as municipal government revenues.

Just after the spill, ”the number of customers plummeted 80 percent,” José Luis Bincas, the owner of a local restaurant, ”La Esquina”, commented to IPS. After that business picked up a little, he said, but ”it has never gone back to what it was.” Similar complaints were heard from the owners of other local businesses.

”I haven’t let my daughters swim in the river for three years, and we stopped eating fish,” said Bincas. One of the tourist attractions in Magdalena was the season for sea bass, which has also been hurt by the ecological disaster.

The pollution affected other economic activities as well, such as the harvesting of reeds that grow along the riverbank, which are used by around 120 families who make a living weaving and selling baskets and other craft items. The artisans complain that their livelihood has been endangered by the drop in the quantity and quality of the river reeds.

The accident occurred in January 1999, when the ”Sea Parana”, a container ship flying the Liberian flag, collided with the ”Estrella Pampeana” oil tanker belonging to Shell in the Rio de la Plata, some 30 kms off the coast of Magdalena.

The crash poked an eight-by-six metre hole in the ship’s oil tanks, and 5,000 tons of crude spilled out. The Dutch-British oil company immediately carried out an environmental impact study and a three-month clean-up operation.

The final impact study reported that the beaches were clean, and that only a small area was affected. It also stated that recovery was complete for the contaminated vegetation, and that the levels of hydrocarbons found in the water, reeds and shellfish were normal. The recovery of the soil was also remarkable, according to the report.

But the residents of Magdalena and the courts do not agree. According to a ruling handed down by federal Judge Julio Miralles in November, Shell must carry out further clean-up and recovery work amounting to a total of 35 million dollars.

Miralles also ordered the oil company to pay a fine of 100,000 pesos (around 28,500 dollars at today’s exchange rate) for each day that the clean-up is delayed. But the company has appealed the sentence, and local residents fear that the legal proceedings will continue to stretch out, and that the local community will eventually lose.

The judge did not order the payment of damages, but merely the work needed to ”remedy” and ”mitigate” the accident’s environmental impact, lawyer Daniel Silva, a representative of the municipal government of Magdalena and a specialist in environmental law, explained to IPS.

The National Water Institute and the Secretariat of the Environment of the province of Buenos Aires carried out their own impact study. Taking more than 4,000 samples in the affected area, they found continued damage to water, soil, flora and fauna.

”There are reversible and irreversible alterations, and the worst thing is that the latter were caused by Shell’s supposed clean-up actions, which removed entire layers of soil in coastal areas and generated irreplaceable losses for the ecosystem,” said Silva.

A group of local residents headed by Mayor Sibetti held a protest early this month in Buenos Aires outside the residence of the family of Máxima Zorreguieta – the young Argentinian woman who married Crown Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands this year.

In a letter addressed to the princess, the protesters asked her to intercede and to ask Shell to assume responsibility for the damages caused.

But no one in Magdalena is optimistic, while some local business owners even prefer to ignore the whole issue. ”If you can’t see the oil slick anymore, that’s because it’s not there,” the manager of a campground, anxious not to lose customers, told IPS.

ENVIRONMENT-ARGENTINA: Resort Town Still Reeling from Oil Spill

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 16 2002 (IPS) - The inflow of weekend and summer visitors to the colonial-era coastal resort town of Magdalena in eastern Argentina has not yet recovered from an early 1999 oil spill by a tanker belonging to transnational oil giant Shell.
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