Water-strapped El Salvador suffers back-to-back molasses spills.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
A pair of industrial spills, both involving large amounts of steaming molasses, have added to El Salvador's already long list of water woes and underscore the need, say activists and some leftwing lawmakers, for strong legislation to better manage and protect the invaluable resource.
The accidents took place less than a month apart, on May 5 and June 1, and affected different rivers: the Magdalena, roughly 70 kilometers west of San Salvador, the capital; and the Las Canas, north of the city, near Apopa. The spills also involved separate companies, but may have been caused by similar circumstances, namely hotter-than-average temperatures causing the molasses, a derivative of sugarcane, to quickly expand--the way boiling milk can suddenly foam over--and thus burst through the storage tanks.
The first case prompted Salvadoran authorities to declare a three-month environmental emergency for the affected area, which includes not only the Magdalena, but also the downstream Rio Paz.
"We're always going to depend on the river because it's our source of subsistence," Guillermo Fajardo, 75, an area resident, told the online news site El Faro. "We have to stop fishing for a good while and be careful with what they give us to eat. But someone needs to take responsibility for the damage they caused us."
The Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, MARN) estimated the scale of the leak at more than 900,000 gallons, 250,000 of which made it into the Magdalena. In a report filed later in the month, the environmental authority concluded that the errant molasses killed all of the fish and other aquatic creatures present along the first 12 kilometers of its trajectory and 40% along the next 68 kilometers. In all, 29 species were affected, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans, and amphibians, according to MARN.
Environment Minister Lina Pohl presented the findings May 23 to the Fiscalia General de la Republica (FGR), the national prosecutor's office, along with a recommendation that Ingenio La Magdalena, the sugar company responsible for the disaster, be made to pay US$4.9 million in damages. "We based our damage estimate on four things," Pohl told reporters. "First, compensation for the affected communities; second, the cost of restoring the ecosystem; third, the administrative costs already borne by both the central and local governments; and fourth, the costs of upgrading Ingenio La Magdalena so...
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