2023-08-16 05:48:33
MARACAIBO, Venezuela (AP) — The humble fishermen of Lake Maracaibo face their worst nightmare every day. Fishing has declined and they have less and less money to support their families. Behind its problems is the pollution that undermines the health and previous beauty of this great freshwater environment, one of the largest in Latin America and the oldest in the world.
Once the heart of Venezuela’s oil industry, the lake has recorded unprecedented levels of pollution and, the government has promised, will be the subject of a rescue plan.
Year following year, the image of crystalline waters is being forgotten by the inhabitants of Zulia state, some 600 kilometers west of the capital Caracas. Visitors came to think that they were facing the nearby Caribbean Sea.
That clear mirror now returns a cloudy reflection following decades of intensive oil exploitation in its bed, as well as due to inadequate maintenance and lack of investment in an obsolete infrastructure with tens of thousands of kilometers of pipes. Oil leaks and failures are frequent.
It also helped to destroy its ecosystem, the exponential growth of the population and agricultural, livestock, aquaculture and industrial activities, which indiscriminately dump their waste into the lake.
Environmental experts maintain that oil contamination began at the beginning of the 20th century and intensified in the 1930s, when a channel of regarding 55 kilometers was dug at the northern end of the lake to allow the navigation of large oil tankers connecting the lake with the sea. open. With the entry of salt water part of the lake fauna died.
Rainwater from more than a hundred tributaries and residual flows from the states of Zulia, Mérida and Trujillo —where some 5.3 million people live— reach Maracaibo due to the lack of treatment plants and inefficient management of the trash. Even the waste from the Colombian department of Norte de Santander, with some 1.6 million inhabitants, ends up in the lake.
The stench affects the residents of the city of Maracaibo, the second most populous in the country, and the proliferation of bacteria generates toxins that can cause the massive death of fish due to the reduction of oxygen in the water and affect human health. according to the conclusions of the team of researchers from the Faculty of Agronomy of the University of Zulia, who for years have studied the contamination in the lake.
The fish no longer come close to the shore because the microalgae “drowns them,” José Aular, a 61-year-old fisherman, told The Associated Press. Whoever gets into those verdigris-covered waters “gets sores (ulcers) on their body,” Aular said. “I say this from experience,” he stressed, referring to a skin condition that forced him to stop working for a long time.
The contamination of the lake is old, but it is now when it is evident on the coasts, said Beltrán Briceño, professor at the University of Zulia and head of the research team and the microbiology laboratory of the Institute of Agricultural Research.
If waste discharges continue and the almost three dozen dilapidated treatment plants that have not worked for years remain paralyzed, “we are going to continue collapsing the lake,” said the expert in environmental microbiology and biotechnology of microalgae and cyanobacteria.
The lake already has high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus. These elements, explained the expert, favor the growth of cyanobacteria, such as microcystin, which is producing 95% of verdigris, a microalgae that releases toxins and which he estimates already occupies 70% of the water.
“There is no magic formula” to recover the lake or a short-term solution, he said, even more so if it continues to be used as “a septic tank.”
The government of President Nicolás Maduro has promised to clean up the situation, an offer pending following more than 20 years of socialist administrations that fishermen doubt.
“It’s a lie,” said Aular, pointing out that on a visit by Maduro last July to the banks of Maracaibo they only “accommodated the streets through which the president was going to pass, nothing else.” On the banks they collected a small portion of the verdigris, he asserted.
The president then announced that he will implement a rescue, conservation and sustainable development plan. And the Minister of Oil, Pedro Tellechea, promised that “there will be no more spills”.
But in the water you can still see large expanses covered in oil leaking from platforms and pipelines with signs of deterioration. “We are correcting them, that is part of the objective,” added the minister.
The promises are accepted with disrepute by the fishermen who remember that oil slicks became commonplace at the beginning of Chávez’s term and that the situation has worsened in the last two years.
What you see, the fishermen point out, would be only a fraction of the crude, since most of it goes to the bottom of the lake, mixes with the bed and kills the animals that live there.
Before, “you would go fishing and catch 700 kilos of shrimp” almost constantly, said Yordi Vicuña, a 33-year-old worker. Now they can spend long days at work and return with around eight kilos, as happened recently. To top it all off, those shrimp were covered in oil and “stank from the verdigris,” he remarked.
Vicuña complained that they can no longer cast the nets anywhere because they are damaged and that the spilled crude adheres to the fishing boats, the engines and even themselves.
Women in coastal towns spend a lot of time trying to get the oil off the fishermen’s clothes and themselves cleaning the oil off their bodies with gasoline.
Since everyone is resigned to not having an immediate definitive solution, Vicuña says ironically that he would be satisfied if they give him “a little cream to put on our skin because it already burns from so much gasoline that I have used.”
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Jorge Rueda reported from Caracas. AP video journalist Juan Pablo Arráez contributed to this report from Venezuela.
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