SANTIAGO (AP) — The state-owned Fundición Ventanas de cobre closed Wednesday after polluting Quintero Bay with toxic gases for decades and turning it, along with 15 other companies, into an environmental “sacrifice zone.”
Eight years ago, the three communes of the bay, Quintero, Puchuncaví and Concón, 160 kilometers northwest of the Chilean capital, were declared saturated and latent zones due to fine particulate matter, the aspiration of which is associated with discomfort and respiratory diseases, but they are not the only pollutants in the town.
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During a formal ceremony held on Wednesday in Puchuncaví, images of flames from the smelter’s furnace were shown that were diminishing until they were extinguished: it was the definitive closure of the Ventanas Smelter, 59 years after its creation. The CODELCO refinery will continue to operate at the site.
The last mass poisoning in the area happened a week ago and affected about a hundred students affected by volatile organic compounds. It was hydrocarbons in a gaseous state, it was officially reported. Until this day, an environmental alert remains in force.
Among the gases that the more than 50,000 inhabitants of the bay breathe is sulfur dioxide, a toxic and corrosive gas that causes nose, eye and throat irritation when breathed in, spewed from Puchuncaví by the Ventanas Smelter, owned by the state CODELCO, the world’s largest copper producer, which in almost sixty years melted some 18 million tons of the red mineral, according to official figures.
More than 60% of the total sulfur dioxide emissions in the area came from the state smelter, President Gabriel Boric said when announcing its closure in June last year. The last environmental alert for this gas was ordered last March, when emissions exceeded the maximum allowed by a preventive and decontamination plan that has been in force since 2019.
During a formal ceremony held on Wednesday in Puchuncaví, images of flames from the smelter’s furnace were shown that were diminishing until they were extinguished: it was the definitive closure of the Ventanas Smelter, 59 years after its creation. The CODELCO refinery will continue to operate at the site.
Martías Asun, director of Greenpeace Chile, told The Associated Press that the closure of the smelter “is a very important step” in an area stigmatized by contamination, but “we still need to see what we do with all the industrial cordon that was generated in around the foundry”.
The oldest company in the area is the oil terminal of the state-owned Empresa Nacional de Petróleo, from 1954. It was followed 10 years later by the CODELCO smelter and refinery and then came steam and coal thermoelectric plants, distributors of fuels, chemical products and lubricants, among others.
The United Nations envoy for Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, visited the bay during the first half of May: “I smelled the toxic fumes from the industry in Ventanas and felt them in my throat.”
“Chile must respond to the environmental crisis by implementing urgent actions to ensure universal access to clean water, clean air and non-toxic environments for all,” he asserted.
Polluting episodes began to decrease significantly in 2019, the year in which emissions from the industrial cordon were regulated. Official data from the Ministry of the Environment indicate that Quintero went from having 19 emergencies, 54 pre-emergencies and 91 alerts in 2015, to one emergency and two alerts last year.
One of the most serious situations of contamination in the bay occurred in August 2018, when hundreds of young people showed symptoms of fainting, dizziness, nausea, headaches, and stomach aches. 31 schools and 19 nurseries were closed.
