Amazon pollution

We saw this pipe line on our way in and out of the Amazon

In 1964, Texaco (now Chevron), discovered oil in the remote northern region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, known as the "Oriente."  Oil workers moved into their backyard and founded the town of Lago Agrio, named for Texaco's birthplace of Sour Lake. However, despite existing environmental laws, Texaco made deliberate, cost-cutting operational decisions that, for 28 years, resulted in an environmental catastrophe that experts have dubbed the "Rainforest Chernobyl.

Texico exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon has done more than pollute the water and soil of one of the world's most unique and irreplacable ecosystems. It has irreversibly altered and degraded an environment that people have called home for millennia. Indigenous people who knew the forest intimately and lived sustainably off its resources for countless generations have found themselves forced into dire poverty, unable to make a living in their traditional ways when the rivers and forests are empty of fish and game. Native Amazonians and recent migrants to the area alike suffer from a health crisis that includes cancer and birth defects. For the indigenous, the physical ailments they suffer from are only accentuated by the cultural impoverishment that the oil industry has brought to the region, in many cases amounting to the almost total loss of ancient traditions and wisdom.

In a rainforest area roughly three times the size of Manhattan, Texaco carved out 350 oil wells, and upon leaving the country in 1992, left behind some 1,000 open toxic waste pits. Many of these pits leak into the water table or overflow in heavy rains, polluting rivers and streams that 30,000 people depend on for drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing. Texaco also dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic and highly saline "formation waters," a byproduct of the drilling process, into the rivers of the Oriente. At the height of Texaco's operations, the company was dumping an estimated 4 million gallons of formation waters per day, a practice outlawed in major US oil producing states like Louisiana, Texas, and California decades before the company began operations in Ecuador in 1967. By handling its toxic waste in Ecuador in ways that were illegal in its home country, Texaco saved an estimated $3 per barrel of oil produced.

Maybe we do need some government regulations.........just sayin.