The Water Authority (ADA), an agency of the province of Buenos Aires, confirmed that the water from the Puelche Aquifer, which supplies San Nicolás and other Buenos Aires towns and which serves as an extraction point for the Atanor company to develop its industrial activities, presents atrazine and its derivatives in all the samples obtained. by the organization in areas adjacent to the firm’s factory. This situation caused concern among the residents of the neighborhood, who went to the city’s Deliberative Council this Thursday to ask the Municipality to provide them with bottled water.
A few weeks ago, a Greenpeace report reported atrazine present in the soil after analyzing samples taken days after the explosion. The company, which manufactures agrochemicals, denied this situation. Now, the ADA, which is the highest authority on water in the province of Buenos Aires, carried out a analysis of three supply wells and four monitoring wells in the area of the Atanor plant, in which the presence of atrazine and its derivatives was detected.
The water with which the plant is served to develop its processes must be of quality, as indicated by The capital the lawyer Fabián Maggi, who is pursuing a case against Atanor for contamination.
The drillings made in the ground to supply this water reach the Puelche Aquifer, a groundwater reservoir that supplies drinking water to various Buenos Aires towns; among them, San Nicolás.
The information that is known now, due to the results of the ADA analyses, is that the aquifer presents “positive values of pesticides in all drillings, both monitoring and supply”.
“When one talks about a water well, it is not something watertight. It is interconnected with the river,” Maggi detailed, to differentiate the monitoring wells from the supply wells: while the former reach between 5 and 8 meters to supply water that is not suitable for human consumption, the latter “travel to depths that reach the Puelche Aquifer, where no one expects the contamination to reach at that depth.”
“In cases of great concern or with evidence, as happened with Atanor, the ADA decided to examine in greater depth. The surprise is finding the contaminants there,” said the lawyer. And he added that the results coincide “with the same substances that Greenpeace announced that I had observed” in the area.
Order bottled water
After knowing the results of these analyses, Neighbors of the neighborhood went to deliver a note to the Deliberative Council of the city to express their concern.
>> Read more: Atanor assures that “there is no presence of atrazine in the surroundings of the plant”
Besides, They requested the Municipality of San Nicolás to provide the residents of the neighborhood with bottled water. “The results are more than bad. (The authorities) should act ex officio and not because of our impulse, since we drink water knowing that it has all that rubbish,” Gabriel Godoy, a neighbor who lives three blocks from the chemical plant, which remains closed, told this medium.
The explosion at the Atanor agrochemical factory It occurred at 3:30 on March 20. According to the company’s explanations on the same day of the incident, it occurred due to “an increase in pressure in the chemical synthesis process of atrazine that caused the rupture of the lid of the reactor affected the process. This gave rise to a fire in the amination sector of the plant”.
atanor explosion
The explosion at the production plant of the Atanor company, in San Nicolás, occurred around 3:30 on March 20.
After the fact, the The atmosphere in several blocks around became unbreathable and they saw each other impregnated white spots in houses, cars and various elements of public roads, from lighting poles and streets to plants.
One day after the explosion, the Buenos Aires justice determined the cessation of activities of the plant, which continues to this day.
