Brazil’s National Department of Infrastructure and Transportation (DNIT) plans a 212-kilometer (132-mile) blasting and dredging project that will demolish 35 kilometers (22 miles) of the 45 kilometer (28 mile) stretch of river known as the Lourencão Rocks all of it culturally and biologically significant.
The company hired to do the job, DTA Engineering (and parent company DTA-O’Martin), says it would need to excavate 986,541 cubic meters (1,290,347 cubic yards) of rock over two and a half years. In addition, DTA would need to dredge a distance totaling 177 kilometers (110 miles), digging up 5,674,000 cubic meters (7,421,319 cubic yards) of sand, destroying seven sand bars, and dumping the load inside the riverbanks where Amazonian turtles now lay their eggs.
In a public hearing I attended July 2, 2019 in Itupiranga municipality (one of five eventually held), DTA Engineering affirmed, in an hour-long slideshow, that no harm would come to the river’s fish.
The fisherfolk had to wait four hours into that meeting to present a different view.
Six community associations from the villages of Vila Belém, Praia Alta, Vila Redonda, Santo Antonino, Cajazeiras, and Vila Tauiry organized fisherfolk to attend the municipal hearing that evening at which more than 450 people overflowed a local school auditorium.
The fisherfolk were eager to know how dozens of months of dynamiting, dredging, bulldozing and the building of industrial ports along what is now a bucolic Amazonian river and afterward, barge traffic putting 100-145 meters of river-width off limits to fishing could possibly not affect their livelihoods.
DTA PowerPoints, promised free access to the new industrial channel, a vow seemed aimed at prospective companies seeking to ship soy and ore, not fisherfolk who in low-water season would be unable to lower their canoes into parts of the Tocantins River their street, their market, lifeline and identity.
In his hour-long presentation, the São Paulo engineer from DTA stated simply: There will be some explosions. And then the fish will momentarily move away.
When the public comment period began four hours in, the tired crowd, smaller then, but with a core persisting, were restricted in their response by organizers and a giant sports clock with red digital letters holding each speaker to three minutes.
But, that’s not how fish act. We know! declared one fisherman, denying the company’s claim.
The fisherfolk described how a warning shot, which DTA plans to fire before dynamiting, would not make fish swim away. At a loud noise, they said, the fish would freeze, then flee deeper into the Lourencão Rocks not away from them to meet their doom.
2020 Copyright Conservation news