When a gas leak set off an explosion Aug. 25 at the Amuay oil refinery in western Venezuela, killing 42 people and sending toxic black clouds of smoke billowing into the air, national attention turned to the poor safety record of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state-owned oil company. But few people inside Venezuela were aware that precisely a week before, on Aug. 17, an oil spill at a PDVSA-operated transshipment facility on Curaçao unleashed one of the worst environmental disasters in that island nation’s history. That accident, in which thousands of barrels of oil were released from the Bullenbaai facility, polluted the Jan Kok nature preserve, a 666-hectare (1,645-acre) refuge for shorebirds and sea turtles just 4.3 kilometers (2.6 miles... [Log in to read more]
