Ecobreves – VENEZUELA: Protests Against Oil Refinery

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

CARACAS, Jul 18 2011 (IPS) - Residents of the town of Las Piedras on the northern outskirts of Punto Fijo, the site of a major oil refinery complex on the Paraguaná peninsula in northwestern Venezuela, have staged street protests over the coke residue and other toxic contaminants emitted by the refinery. "We are constantly swallowing contaminated dust. There are always spills in the saltwater lagoon (on the shore of Gulf of Venezuela) and bad smells. But now the toxic dust is getting into the children’s lungs and giving them tonsillitis and bronchitis,” Joana Chirinos, one of the protestors, told Tierramérica.

The waters of the small lagoon normally absorb the soot given off by the refinery, where hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are distilled every day by the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). But over the past weeks, an ongoing drought and a shift in wind patterns have diminished the water level of the lagoon and its capacity to trap the soot.

PDVSA announced that it will attempt to refill the lagoon with seawater after removing 25,000 cubic meters of household and oil refinery wastes.