FOCUS - Brazil slaps fine on Petrobras for oil spill
Date: 28-Jan-00
Country: BRAZIL
The president of Petrobras, which admitted a week ago that its flagship
refinery had oozed a whopping 1.3 million litres of fuel oil into the
city's Guanabara Bay, said the company would pay the 50 million reais
($28 million) fine along with all other clean-up costs.
"It's the big responsibility of a major oil company to pay for all of
the expenses for this operation," said Henri Philippe Reichstul, who
only took over the reins of the Rio-based oil and natural gas Goliath
last April.
Petrobras is facing sharp criticism for the leak, the worst in Rio's bay
since a foreign tanker dumped 6 million litres of oil there in 1975.
Environment Minister Jose Sarney Filho described it as a "disaster of
gigantic proportions."
Also on Tuesday, the company issued its initial investigation report,
which blamed the accident on a pipeline that ruptured due to a
combination of thermal expansion causing pressure inside the duct and
unstable footing underneath it.
In a surprise disclosure, the report said human error meant the leakage
continued for four hours instead of two before being detected, allowing
for 600,000 more litres to escape.
A source within the company, quoted anonymously in local media, had
originally blamed the delay in discovering the enormous spill on a
computer software glitch at the refinery.
But the report said there were "strong indications" that one of the
regular procedural checks on volumes going in and coming out of the
pipeline had not been done.
The report did not cite the names or job descriptions of the employees
responsible for the oversight.
Brazil's federal police, in a separate criminal investigation, plan to
question company executives including Reichstul and the superintendent
of the leaky refinery, Kuniyuki Terabi.
The attorney general is also expected to summon two former Petrobras
directors, plus those refinery employees on duty at the time of the
leak. The company sacked its corporate affairs director and environment
superintendent over the weekend.
Three specialists from the government's environment agency IBAMA will
assess the spill's impact and deliver their findings by Thursday.
The 15-square-mile (40 sq km) oil slick has spread across the back of
the bay and reached Ilha do Governador, the island site of Rio's
international airport 12 miles (20 km) from the main tourist beaches -
so far viewed as free of risk.
But it has left a slimy black coating over a number of small beaches and
four protected mangrove swamps extending over 3,700 acres (1,500
hectares). Volunteers have mounted a desperate campaign to rescue dying
birds, fish and other wildlife trapped in the sticky oil.
Hundreds of local fishermen, who say their livelihoods have been ruined
by the spill, have united to file a private claim against Petrobras
expected to be worth millions of reais.
The company has imported thousands of buoys from Britain, Canada and the
United States to build a floating wall to contain the leak within the
bay's rear portion, well away from the city's most famous beaches of
Ipanema and Copacabana.
