Amazon community battles Chinese oil firm: ‘Rainfall tastes like coal’
- Local people object to widespread practice of flaring, where natural gas produced from oil wells is burned
- Indigenous Waorani say smoke produced is contaminating their land and water sources
Indigenous Waorani from Ecuador’s Amazon filed a lawsuit on Thursday against state-owned Chinese oil company PetroOriental, accusing it of contaminating their ancestral lands by burning off natural gas from oil wells in a process known as flaring.
Leaders of the Waorani village of Miwaguno went to a court in Francisco de Orellana, the main town of Orellana province east of Quito, to file the lawsuit “as victims”.
“We have seen our way of life altered forever,” the community stated in the complaint. “Our very survival is threatened as a result of climate change.”
The local people are objecting to the widespread practice of flaring, where oil producers – in this case PetroOriental – deliberately burn off millions of cubic meters of natural gas produced from oil wells.
Environmentalists say the province of Orellana has a high concentration of oil burners, and the Waorani say the smoke produced is contaminating their land and water sources.
“The rainfall tastes like coal. We still use it because we don’t have drinking water,” said Menare Omene, a 52-year-old Waorani woman, whose community of about 150 people presented the complaint.
