Chevron in Ecuador

The archive of the Clean Up Ecuador campaign website


Separation Station, Shushufindi Southeast (Spanish)

This is the first of Texaco's 18 separation stations to be inspected, and the results were extremely negative for the company. At each separation station, Texaco separated the water of formation from the marketable crude and simply dumped sludge into a large wetlands area, sometimes at the rate of millions of gallons per week. Some of the results from this particular inspection were as follows:

  • TPHs found in soil samples by the plaintiffs were over 15 times maximum levels permitted by Ecuadorian norms;
  • Of the 40 samples taken by ChevronTexaco, nine were at least 29 times over the maximum levels allowed by Ecuadorian norms, and one was 138 times over the maximum levels;
  • A total of 16 of the samples taken by ChevronTexaco at the site were over Ecuadorian norms for TPHs, Barium, Copper, and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs)