Audios reveal the causes of the largest oil spill in Peru.
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Exclusive. The audios of the “black box” and the cameras of the Italian oil tanker “Mare Doricum” reveal the causes of the largest oil spill in Peru, which occurrred on January 15, 2022, during an operation contracted by Repsol.
On January 15, 2022, Peru's largest environmental disaster occurred when, in the middle of an unloading operation contracted by the La Pampillla Refinery, owned by the Spanish company Repsol, nearly 14,000 barrels of oil spilled into the sea off Ventanilla, affecting beaches, protected natural reserves, and marine resources in an unprecedented way.
Until today, the effects of the oil spill, the largest of its kind in the country, were known, but the causes were not.
The key to everything was in the VDR system or “black box” of the Italian-flagged oil tanker “Mare Doricum,” which the day before, January 14, 2022, had arrived in Callao from Sao Paulo, Brazil, carrying 987,671 barrels of crude oil acquired by Repsol from the Brazilian oil company Petrobras.
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This report, produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center, shows for the first time the dialogues of the protagonists of that operation, contained in the audios of the “black box” of the Italian ship, the images of the ship's cameras, and points out documents and experts' reports that show a chain of errors that led to the outcome.
The report also reveals that the oil spill occurred in two moments: the first, in the afternoon of January 15, when the so-called PLEM, the metal connector that joins the ship's valves with the hoses of the underwater pipeline of the La Pampilla Refinery, broke, and the second, during the night, when a significant amount of crude that had already been deposited in the refinery's tanks, on land, returned to the sea.
Repsol's managers and lawyers in Peru chose not to comment for the report “The Black Box of the Mare Doricum”; neither did the lawyers of the Italian company Fratelli D'Amico Armatori, owner of the tanker, nor their representatives in Italy, who were contacted by our ally in that country, the investigative journalistic media outlet IRPI Media.
