Derramamento de óleo bruto na costa brasileira em 2019: emergência em saúde pública em questão

Abstract

A crude oil spill was first identified on the Brazilian coast on August 30, 2019, and has reached 4,334 km of coastline in 11 states of the Northeast and Southeast, with 120 municipalities (counties) and 724 locations, as of November 22, 2019 1. The disaster is considered the worst oil spill in Brazil's history and one of the largest on record in the world. The sequence of the phenomena cannot be attributed to chance, rather expressing probabilities that increase as a function of an unsustainable development model, environmental crisis, institutional unpreparedness for the prevention of expanded social and technical events, with obsolete legal frameworks that rarely punish the large conglomerates responsible for them, and discriminatory policies against vulnerable populations, among other weaknesses 2. The scale of the government's response, particularly that of the health sector, must be assessed in order to minimize the population's health problems and organize effective responses, given the potential occurrence of similar phenomena. Brazil has been stage to major environmental disasters of global proportions in the last five years. In 2015, the collapse of the Samarco company's Fundão mine tailings dam in Mariana, state of Minas Gerais, considered the largest of its kind on record, contaminated approximately 650 km of riverine and marine territories, with material and health damage that will persist for years. In 2018, involving the same mining conglomerate, the Córrego do Feijão tailings dam collapsed in Brumadinho, also in the state of Minas Gerais, resulting in 254 deaths to date 2. This represents the largest fatal work accident on record in Brazil. In the mining tragedies, the health sector at the three levels of government played a secondary role, without demonstrating the capacity to ensure quality healthcare for the affected communities. In this same spectrum, the frequency of non-natural tragedies has increased around the globe, revealing the hazardous unpreparedness of the public health sector to deal with large-scale disasters. Bhopal (1984), in India, with more than 200,000 deaths, Chernobyl (1986), in Ukraine, and Fukushima (2011), in Japan, are examples of such expanded risks. Accidents of similar magnitude to that of the oil spill on the Brazilian coast have increased, underlining the severity of health impacts and the need for organized responses to events characterized as public health emergencies 3. Examples of crude oil disasters of a global scale include Deepwater Horizon in 2010, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, considered the largest on record,

Landslide and Environmental Risk from Oil Spill due to the Rupture of SOTE and OCP Pipelines, San Rafael Falls, Amazon Basin, Ecuador

“…If this event constantly occurs, it could cause adverse damage to the benthic and epibentic organisms of the river [1], [55]- [57]. Similarly, in the section of the Quijos -Coca river basin through which the SOTE and OCP transfer lines pass, there is a lack of information that the state has inventoried the previous spills that have occurred due to the rupture of the SOTE transfer lines and OCP, which does not happen in the case of the environmental risks generated in the hydrocarbon activities [15], [58], [59]. The spills caused are inventoried by the Environmental and Social Repair Program PRAS, where it monitors the comprehensive repair plan of the Amazon district with a percentage of 39% compliance up to the year 2017.…”

Derramamento de petróleo no litoral brasileiro: (in)visibilidade de saberes e descaso com a vida de marisqueiras

“…As pescadoras alertam para a omissão do poder público local na difusão de esclarecimentos, o que dificulta o planejamento no combate às manchas de petróleo. Segundo Pena et al 30 foi corriqueiro nesse desastre a propagação de informações desencontradas das autoridades sem base técnica como, por exemplo, a indicação da suspensão generalizada do consumo de peixes e mariscos no Nordeste do Brasil. Com isso, foi percebido um elevado nível de preocupação e estresse em relação à incerteza dos impactos ecológicos e socioeconômicos a curto, médio e longo prazo.…”

Brazilian offshore oil exploration areas: an overview of hydrocarbon pollution

“…The crude oil spill has compromised the health of 360,000 artisanal fishers in Northeast Brazil, besides those living on the coast in the states of Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast. Considering the territorial extension and affected population, this oil spill disaster is the equivalent of hundreds of Brazilian refineries and petrochemical factories having their workplaces contaminated and being closed down due to sudden, uncontrolled exposure to petroleum and aromatic hydrocarbons, and without the health sector's protection (Pena et al, 2020).…”