Campeche Oil Spill Damges Environment
(Ebru News/AP) Residents of the Mexican region of Campeche said on Monday they feared an environmental catastrophe in the area, after oil spilled during an accident at an oil company reached their shores.
"This could turn into a big catastrophe, because we have here a natural protected area, we have 7-thousand protected hectares, there are lots of species at the Terminos lagoon, besides the dolphins that live in this natural area," said Leidy Mendez, a resident of the Terminos lagoon area.
Pictures aired by Televisa on Monday showed oil in coastal waters and in soil close to the sea in Campeche.
Stormy weather in the Gulf of Mexico forced Pemex to suspend efforts to fix a damaged valve line still spewing oil and natural gas almost a week after a platform-rig collision that killed at least 21 workers.
Strong winds and waves forced a pullback of repair crews who were trying to contain the spill by injecting cement into the line.
Ships had surrounded the oil with containment booms, but a plan to apply chemicals that disperse or break down the oil was interrupted by the rough weather.
Pemex said the spilled crude remained far at sea, but Mexico's attorney general for environmental protection said some of the spill had proved hard to control and that "more crude than originally expected may reach the coast" of Campeche.
Pemex also was struggling to contain a spill from a pipeline crack in Veracruz state that dumped an estimated 10-thousand barrels of oil into the Jaltepec and Coatzacoalcos coastal rivers.
The company said it had set up five successive containment barriers to prevent that spill from reaching the downstream city of Coatzacoalcos and the Gulf.
But drinking water was cut off to some upstream communities, and the government said it was supplying them with bottled water and food.
Rough weather also made the river rise, carrying some of the oil to beaches around where the Coatzacoalcos river runs into the Gulf.
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