Citizens of Brazil’s Valley of Death Breathing Easier After Two Years of Cleanup

CUBATAO, Brazil — People are breathing cleaner air in this industrial city, long considered one of the world’s most polluted and known in Brazil as the Valley of Death.

The United Nations-affiliated World Health Organization and local ecological groups say that a $500-million government cleanup program has produced substantial improvements in pollution levels in Cubatao, 37 miles southeast of the financial-industrial center of Sao Paulo and next door to the coffee port of Santos.

When the state’s Environmental Control Agency began the anti-pollution campaign two years ago, the smoke stacks at Cubatao’s 23 industries spewed out almost 500 tons of pollutants a day. Today the level has dropped to about 165 tons, Benedito da Conceicao, the agency’s local manager, said in an interview.

In the meantime, many of Cubatao’s 100,000 inhabitants were afflicted by pulmonary edemas, bronchial infections, skin cancer, leukemia and other diseases caused by the toxic emissions from the city’s oil refinery and steel mill and from fertilizer, petrochemical and cement plants.

No precise health statistics are available from before or after Cubatao’s cleanup, but Conceicao said that he was “certain health standards have improved since 1984.”

Edilberto Pereira, a 42-year-old luncheonette owner, agreed.

“I’ve lived here all my life and it was only last year that I stopped having trouble breathing,” he said. “And the headaches that I had almost every day are also gone. There is no doubt in my mind that the air here has never been cleaner.”

Several of his customers nodded in agreement.

Troubles Linger

But some neighborhoods, particularly those near factories where pollution has yet to be conquered, are still troubled.

One such area is Vila Parisi, a sprawling shantytown of about 5,000 people.

“The air here is just as polluted as it was when I first arrived 10 years ago,” Adelaide Maria da Silva, a 40-year-old housewife, said. “Just about every other day my four children have trouble breathing, and I have to rush them over to the health station.”

The Vila Parisi Health Station still treats about 30 to 40 people a day for eye infections and breathing problems.

‘Tolerable levels’ Sought

“Of course there are still health problems because pollution still exists,” Conceicao said. “In fact Cubatao will never be a pollution-free city. The only way to accomplish this would be to shut down all the industries, and that would be economically unviable.”

He said the objective was to bring pollution to “tolerable levels” by the end of 1988 or 1989.

Cubatao’s rapid industrialization began in the 1950s when several companies, attracted to its proximity to Santos and Sao Paulo, installed plants here.

But no attention was given to the surrounding mountains that prevented proper wind dispersal and trapped toxic industrial emissions. The city became wrapped in a permanent shroud of poisonous gases, and many pollutants returned to the soil in the form of acid rain. At first people put up with it, maintaining that “pollution meant progress.”

Conceicao said the $500 million allotted for the pollution-control program was for installing filters, incinerators and other pollution treatment systems in Cubatao’s 23 industries.

RABU, 11 OGOS 2010

The Valley of Death

We are surrounded by facts, everywhere we look a fact is playing itself out right in front of our face. Most facts are so common place that no one takes any notice, while others are so incredible, or against the norm that they stand out as either a warning or an inspiration to our minds and hearts.

Cubatao a town in Brazil has been nicknamed “The Valley of Death” because the pollution was so high that is was overpowering nearby forests, killing them much like what one could expect to see on the outskirts of a nuclear blast zone. In the 1980s Cubatao’s land, air and water systems were voted the most polluted in the world.

After an oil spill in 1984, drastic measures were taken to clean up the more than 24 industries in Cubatao. By 2009, Cubatao had made a lot of progress in their clean-up efforts. After $1.2 billion US of funding, it will still take many, many years of drastic measures to clean the area.

Probably the saddest and most amazing facts are that Cubatao has the highest rate of children born with Anencephaly, a disorder that is commonly referred to as “brainless child”. More than half of the brain, skull and scalp are not formed by the time of birth. These children if they are not stillborn typically die within a couple hours of birth.

Knowing that this level of pollution is possible in a city of 110,000 occupants is one of the most amazing facts that need to be rectified. Hopefully in the future Cubatao can be known as the city that has changed its habits the most.

Posted by S.Abdull Halim at Rabu, Ogos 11, 2010

Brazilian city battles pollution. Quality of air, water improves in `valley of death’

By Tyler Bridges, Special to The Christian Science Monitor / May 23, 1988

Cubatao, Brazil

Thanks to perhaps the biggest anti-pollution program ever mounted in Brazil, this industrial city nestled in the Serra do Mar mountains is on the way to losing its reputation as “the valley of death.” With the Sao Paulo State environmental agency, Cetesb, mandating industrial companies to reduce effluence that had made this one of the worst polluted cities in the world, Cubatao’s air, water, and soil are much cleaner than before, Cetesb officials and Cubatao residents say.

Two solid signs of this are that fish have returned to the Cubatao River after a 25-year absence, and the mountains are again growing thick with vegetation.

But as the cloud of dirty air still hanging over Cubatao indicates, the battle to clean up the emissions is far from over. And environmentalists say residues from heavy metals could still be posing life-threatening health risks.

“The situation has improved, but Cetesb hasn’t solved the pollution problem,” says Fabio Feldmann, Brazil’s leading environmentalist in Congress. “Heavy metals persist for a long time.”

Cetesb’s success in Cubatao is one of the few such victories in the third world, where environmental problems are quickly becoming worse than in developed countries.

In their rush to industrialize and give their citizens a better life, third world nations have rarely given thought to protecting the environment.

While concern for the environment has become a byword in the United States and Western Europe, people in countries such as Brazil are only beginning to learn the meaning of words such as pollution, ecology, and smog. Not surprisingly, then, few governments have had both the will and the power needed to take action against polluters.

“In Brazil, the government has thought that development should come at any cost,” says Renato Tucunduva, president of the Sao Paulo Consumers Association.

The cost for Cubatao’s 100,000 residents has been high.

In 1984, a slum neighborhood blew up after gasoline leaked from an underground pipe owned by Petrobras, the state-owned oil company. The government put the death toll at 90. But Cetesb officials say another 400 people were incinerated without a trace.

As much as half of Cubatao’s population has suffered from respiratory ailments. Rates for skin cancer and leukemia are believed to be abnormally high, although exact statistics are not available.

Hundreds of workers at Cosipa, the goverment-owned Sao Paulo Steel Co. have been laid off for health problems.

“The future isn’t too bright,” says Antonio da Silva, a Cosipa worker laid off two years ago.

But Mr. da Silva says air pollution in the slum where he lives, Vila Parisi, has improved considerably in the past two years.

Since 1984, Cetesb has been requiring Cubatao’s often-reluctant industrial concerns to reduce emissions from a total of 320 air, water, and soil pollution sources.

To date, emissions from 71 percent of these sources have been brought to levels acceptable to the World Health Organization, according to Benedito da Concei,cao, who heads Cetesb’s office here, pointing to statistics showing a reduction in a wide range of pollutants.

Geraldo da Cruz, one of several people spending a recent afternoon fishing on a muddy bank of the Cubatao River, said he was glad that pollution levels had been reduced. “I love to eat fish,” he said, adding that he didn’t fear possible contamination.

But winning the battle against pollution in Cubatao hasn’t been easy.

Mr. da Concei,cao says the agency has had to fine each of the 23 industrial companies responsible for the pollution in trying to force them to comply with Ceteo’s orders.

This has cost the companies about $1 million, although this is only a fraction of the $300 million they’ve had to spend on scrubbers, filters, water treatment facilities, and other pollution control equipment.

Da Concei,cao says the firms will have to spend another $200 million to control the remaining pollution sources by the December 1989 deadline.

The Cetesb official complained that Cosipa has been particularly laggard in meeting emission-control orders.

“Some companies have been a little slow in reacting to the problem,” says Mario Cilento, plant manager at Carbocloro, an industrial concern 50 percent owned by Dallas-based Diamond Shamrock Corp. “Sometimes the solutions to the problems take time.”

Several Cetesb officials complained that companies pressured agency higher-ups into granting them a three-year extension for meeting the emission deadline, which had originally been December 1986.

“We’re not as rigorous with the companies as we were before,” says a Cetesb official, adding that several agency staffers in Cubatao were transferred because their zeal made companies unhappy. “We have the law on our side, but politics often intrudes.”

Cubatao seemed an ideal location for development when the county’s military regime in the 1960s began its industrialization drive. The 23 Brazilian and multinational companies that built factories here turned the outskirts of town into a sprawl of steel, cement, and fertilizer factories.

Pollution soon followed, becoming particularly dangerous because the surrounding mountains prevented proper wind dispersal and trapped the toxic gases and dust.

“It takes time to overcome our tradition of not being concerned with the environment,” says Concei,cao. “Despite our success here, there are still many Cubataos in Brazil.”

Cubatao Journal; Signs of Life in Brazil’s Industrial Valley of Death

By JAMES BROOKE
Published: June 15, 1991

After school let out one recent afternoon here, Cleiton Celio Silva Araujo grabbed hooks, line and a bamboo pole and scrambled down a bank of the Cubatao River. Within an hour, the gangly 13-year-old was filling a plastic bag with fish.

Out of place in this tableau was the background: metal chimneys and ducts of a riverside styrene plant. Even more out of place was a label that Brazilian environmentalists long ago gave to this industrial city: the Valley of Death.

In a striking example of a turnaround in industrial pollution in Latin America, Cubatao’s residents are now enjoying the benefits of a frontal attack on the poisons that once flowed freely from Brazil’s largest industrial park.

Today, a verdant mantle of trees and bushes cover mountainsides that surround the steel, fertilizer and petrochemical plants of Cubatao Valley. Less than a decade ago, clouds of ammonia and fluorides rendered the mountain ridges a lifeless skyline of dead tree trunks.

In health clinics here, the infant mortality rate dropped in half and oxygen masks fell out of fashion as the number of life-threatening smog alerts fell from 16 in 1984 to one last year. ‘Lemonade From the Lemon’

And in a city that once prided itself on growth at any cost, the Mayor, a former business leader, now takes pride in his campaign: “Cubatao — City Symbol of Ecology.” This campaign includes planting 130,000 trees, establishing four municipal “ecological parks,” requiring environmental education in city schools, building bicycle pathways and a sewer system and enlisting Brazil’s renowned landscape artist, Burle Marx, to design a parkway entrance for the city.

“Cubatao was always described as one of the most polluted places in the world,” the Mayor, Nei Eduardo Serra, said. “Today, Cubatao has become an example of a solution to the problem of third-world pollution.”

Convinced that others should learn from Cubatao’s experience, Mr. Serra plans to charter buses to bring delegates here from the United Nations Conference on Development and the Environment, which will be held next year in Rio de Janeiro. Riding buses to this city of 130,000 people 35 miles south of Sao Paulo will undoubtedly be American and Mexican environmentalists interested in cutting pollution in Mexico as part of a North American free trade pact.

“The Mayor has managed to make lemonade from the lemon,” said an admirer, Werner E. Zulauf, an engineer who in the mid-1980’s was president of Cetesb, Sao Paulo state’s environmental protection agency.

Cubatao appeared to have hit bottom in 1981, the year Mr. Serra and a group of fellow thinkers formed a group called Valley of Life.

Blocked by a 2,800-foot mountain range, thermal inversions routinely occurred, fueled by 114,416 tons of particulate matter that Cubatao’s smokestacks annually belched into the air. Deadening rivers, the valley’s 23 major industries annually poured out a liquid filth that added up to 22,678 tons of organic matter and 1,467 tons of heavy metals, according to Cetesb. Regulations Enforced

The plants here were built during Brazil’s headlong industrialization of the 1960’s and 1970’s and few had pollution controls. Mr. Zulauf recalled the reaction of businessmen in December 1983 when he ordered companies to comply with existing antipollution regulations.

“The industrialists immediately started telephoning the Governor,” he recalled, referring to Franco Montoro. “But the Governor refused to take their calls. He told them to see me.”

Political backing turned out not to be enough. In the next year, Cubatao truly hit bottom.

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