A report produced by experts from the Federal Police estimates the damage caused by the oil spill on the Brazilian northeast coast at R$ 525.3 million, which resulted in stains in more than a thousand locations in 2019.
The PF concluded the investigation of the environmental accident in 2020 and indicated the Greek-flagged vessel NM Bouboulina as responsible for the leak. The spots reached the beaches of the Northeast in late August 2019 and, by March of the following year, had spread over 2,000 km in length.
At the time of the conclusion of the PF, the company Delta Tankers, which owns the ship, stated that an inspection carried out on the vessel did not find evidence of the leak.
According to the experts, the value must still be updated when charged to those responsible and does not represent the entirety of the damage estimate, but a “minimum value based on economic methodologies of replacement cost of ecosystem services and public expenditures”.
Also according to them, the oil spill and the arrival of waste on the Brazilian coast presented “peculiar characteristics and unprecedented dynamics in relation to other events”, which made possible the “manual (or eventually mechanized) collection of oil on beaches, mangroves and coasts almost immediately.”
These characteristics of the incident, says the PF, reduced the possibility of characterizing environmental damage.
Technicians were at locations on the coast of Bahia where the stains appeared in the first week of December 2019 to recognize the damage and collect information.
Between March 18 and 22, 2022, experts also visited conservation units in Alagoas to assess effects and interview people who acted in response to the incident.
The analysis of the information collected during the investigation, say the experts, sought to estimate minimum costs for “prompt response to the incident” and the estimated values ​​to “restore and/or compensate for the loss of productive capacity” and the sacrificed ecosystem functions.​
According to the technicians’ estimate, the cost of identifying, removing and measuring the degradation was R$ 198.5 million.
The amount includes expenses, according to the PF, with the expenses declared by the institutions involved in the “mobilization, displacement and maintenance of teams for locating, mapping, collecting and disposing of oil, as well as the cost of research to understand the effects of oil”.
On the other hand, to assess the restoration and compensation of productive capacity, the PF sent a questionnaire to the 126 municipalities in the affected cities. Only 13 answered questions that would serve as a basis for the experts to stipulate the costs of the initial response to the incident, the revealed epidemiological and socioeconomic effects and the environmental damage recovery action.
Due to the scarcity of data, the PF, after interviews with affected citizens in Alagoas, sought information on losses in the fishing and tourism sectors, identified as the most impacted.
To estimate the amount of damage to the 65,900 fishermen, data from the compensation measures intended for them by the federal government were used. Thus, the PF reached the updated amount of R$ 159.8 million.
Finally, the experts focused on the values ​​dispensed in the “restoration and compensation of sacrificed ecosystem functions”.
For this, they used a method of calculation of environmental damage existing in the legislation of the state of Florida, in the United States.
The calculation made from the American formula takes into account the amount of waste dumped into the sea, the area impacted, the location and other factors.
The amount reached by the experts was R$ 166.9 million in damages caused by where the oil passed.
