Brazil faces a mysterious oil spill | Society



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Crude oil collection this Sunday at Cape Santo Agostinho, Pernambuco.

A viscous and heavy oil of mysterious origin continues to arrive in the form of huge plastones of the sea to some of the most spectacular beaches of Brazil. For now, the balance of damage is limited – nearly twenty turtles and two birds are dead – but the sites that have already reached the second largest bay in the world threaten coral sanctuaries, a diversified wildlife and crustaceans and tourism . At the same time, the oil spill becomes a political problem. More than 500 tonnes of crude oil were collected from 200 beaches along some 2,500 kilometers of Brazil's northeast coast.

Although this is one of the worst environmental disasters on the Brazilian coast, the amount of oil collected is far removed from the worst oil spills in history. The worst was that of the Emperor of the Atlantic, in 1979, with a spill of 287 000 million tons; that of the Prestige, in 2002 off the coast of Galicia (Spain), was 63,000 tons, according to the database of Itopf oil spills.

Over the weekend, several groups of volunteers joined local environmental agency officials and Petrobras employees who are overworked and have been working for weeks to remove the stains of thick oil that reach the sand, clean up dying tortoises and protect vulnerable coral reefs.

The oil spill has already affected nine states in the north-east of the country, including famous beaches with local and foreign tourists, such as Barra in Todos los Santos Bay, in Salvador de Bahia.

The biggest problem for the moment is uncertainty. As the origin of oil, which began to appear on the coast nearly two months ago, is unknown, the authorities do not know how long it will last. The government ensures that the crude oil's DNA is Venezuelan, but the issue of the culprits is much more diffuse. One hypothesis is that it's about criminals, who may have made an illegal transfer, or who may be the result of a sinking.

The management of the oil spill has caused friction between the federal government and the Northeast governments because, because the oil is extremely heavy, it is very difficult to stop it with the traditional barriers of the buoys, since it flows and n is detected only when it appears on the shore.

The Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, came to insist a few days ago that the spill could be an attempt to derail a super-oil field site scheduled for November 6 with which the government intends to raise some 23,000 million euros.

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