By: Agence France-Presse
Volunteers have launched a beach clean-up in an area of Mexico where environmental authorities say oil is washing ashore after an alleged leak involving state energy giant Pemex.
The oil “will of course have a serious environmental impact,” Alejandro Brown Gantus, deputy public prosecutor for environmental crimes in the southeastern state of Campeche, told AFPTV.
“There were more than 100 square kilometers (39 square miles) of hydrocarbons in the sea and this was dispersed with the sea currents along all the beaches in the Gulf,” he added.
Residents and environmentalists have tried in recent days to clean a beach in the town of Lerma, where patches of black were visible in the sea.
On July 18, environmental groups reported an alleged oil spill in an area of the Gulf of Mexico where an explosion earlier in the month killed two workers at a gas production platform of state company Pemex.
Satellite images showed that the spill began on July 4, three days before the blast, and had spread over some 400 square kilometers (154 square miles), said the NGOs, which included Greenpeace.
Debt-laden Pemex, which has suffered a string of accidents in recent years, acknowledged that it had detected a leak in the Gulf of Mexico on July 3 that it said was repaired on July 22.
But it insisted that there was no spill related to the explosion and suggested that pollution in the sea was the result of “natural hydrocarbon emissions.”