Disruption endangers families in Paraná

Monday 26th of September, one of the nine gates of the hydroelectric plant Salto Osorio broke, causing apprehension, fear and insecurity for hundreds of families. The dam is located in the Iguazu River between the towns of Iguazu Falls and São Jorge do Oeste in the state of Paraná.

Suez Tractebel, which has the concession of the plant, has not yet released an official statement. To solve the problem, it will be necessary to deepen the lake an extra 20 meters, almost drying the reservoir. This will cause the dead of most fishes.

“This is a complicated situation. It was the breaking of just one lock, but who knows that this is an isolated incident and may not be repeated in a more serious proportion? Families are apprehensive, the information is very inaccurate and that worries us a lot” says Robson Fórmica, coordinatior of MAB in Paraná.

For the electrical engineer and director of the Union of Engineers of Paraná, Antonio Goulart, these problems are inherent the actual structure of the energy model, where the interest is to have a lot of profit. “The electricity blackout is a result of lack of investment by private companies, the workers in the electricity sector have precarious working conditions and more recently we had the blackout of Itaipu transmission lines, a series of explosions and serious problems with distributors such as Ligth in Rio de Janeiro. And now these problems in Salto Osorio that could have been much more severe. They reveal the damages caused by the privatization of the electricity sector” Goulart said.

Suez Tractebel is the largest private producer of hydroelectricity in Brazil. In the south it controls the plants that were owned by Eletrosul until privatized in 1997. “The transnational gains annually billions of profits and forward them to their headquarters in France. It also leads to Europe all the wealth of land, biodiversity and the work of the affected people who had to leave their land when the plant was built. The people got all the impacts and now the threat and insecurity to new disruptions and their consequences, “concluded Robson.