Spanish energy giant Repsol has vowed to finish by March the cleaning up a devastating oil spill that has polluted beaches and killed wildlife.
Almost 12,000 barrels of crude spilled into the sea off Peru on January 15 as a tanker unloaded oil at a Repsol owned refinery.
“We expect that if the weather allows us then, in mid-March” the cleaning of the beaches and islands off the coast will be completed, the company’s environmental security director Jose Terol said.
“That is an optimistic scenario,” he told journalists during a visit to the company’s emergency operations centre.
The new timeline revises what company executives had said as recently as on Tuesday, that cleaning the beaches and the ocean would finish in late February.
Terol said that the March deadline was contingent on the removal of the remnant oil from remote rocky cliffs, which are harder to reach due to strong waves.
“By mid-February, there will already be no more slicks in the sea. In an optimistic scenario, work on the difficult to access areas will be finished by the end of March,” he said.
Peru’s government described the spill – which Repsol blamed on freak waves caused by a volcanic eruption more than 10,000km away near Tonga – as an “ecological disaster”.
The oil slick has been dragged by ocean currents about 140km north of the refinery, prosecutors said, causing the death of an undetermined number of fish and seabirds.
Peru has demanded compensation from Repsol, and the energy giant faces a potential $34.5mn fine, the environment ministry has said.
Even as the Repsol spokesman spoke, a group of protesters from the hard-hit nearby beach town of Ancon gathered with signs and chanted demands outside the plant.
“Repsol accept responsibility”, and “Repsol murderer, the beaches of Ancon are in mourning” were among their signs.
“The reason for the protest is that (the oil spill) has left us without work because of this contamination of the sea in Ancon,” Miguel Basurto, a 53-year-old motorcycle taxi driver, told AFP.
“We feel outraged because we have no support from the Repsol company. They clean their hands of it, and go away and leave us with all this pollution that affects children and the elderly,” said merchant Ana Garrido, 40.
It was the first time since the spill that Repsol let journalists visit its La Pampilla refinery – to see how 90 specialists there are managing the 3,000 people who are cleaning up the spill.