Cutting the Lifeline: The Trans-Ecuadorean Pipeline Disaster

The geography of Ecuador is defined by the Andes Mountains that split it in two.  On the west side are the Pacific Ocean and fertile coastal plains known as “La Costa” containing some of the richest farmland in South America.  To the east in “El Oriente” is the enormous Amazon rainforest, home of many indigenous tribes and near-impenetrable national parks.  The Andean “Sierra” that runs down the center includes some of the tallest volcanoes on Earth, towering up to 20,000 feet into the sky and still a very much active part of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire.

Like many of its neighbors in the north of the continent, Ecuador is blessed with abundant petroleum reserves that have accounted for up to 40 to 60 percent of the country’s exports since serious drilling began in the late 1960s.  Ecuador’s unique geography, however, presented a major problem: the oil deposits were all on the Amazonian side of the mountains.  The Sierra presented a formidable barrier to get oil across from the drilling fields to the ports on the coast.

To solve this problem, the government commissioned the building of the Trans-Ecuadorean Pipeline in 1972.  The 26-inch-diameter pipe and associated pump and pressure reducing stations would transport nearly all of the nation’s crude oil to a marine terminal port near Esmeraldas on the Pacific coast.  The smaller 6-inch Poliducto Pipeline would later be built along the same right of way as far as Quito to transport propane gas and other hydrocarbons.

Where mountain and jungle come together over a tectonic plate boundary, however, even the best petroleum and pipeline engineering will be challenged by the forces of nature – and these pipelines hardly benefited from the best engineering, planning, or maintenance.  When the east Andean foothills were rocked by a pair of large earthquakes in 1987, one location with a 500 year-long record of trouble became the site of the worst pipeline disaster in history. 

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