the-black-curse-toxic-ecuadorean-rainforest: The Ecuadorian Amazon is suffering a public health crisis of immense proportions. The root cause of this crisis is water contamination from 40 years of oil operations. On February 14 2011, a judge in Lago Agrio ruled that Chevron, now owner of Texaco, had to pay $9 billion in environmental damages for polluting the rainforest, in an unprecedented environmental ruling. The oil infrastructure developed and operated by Texaco had utterly inadequate environmental controls, and consequently Texaco dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater directly into the region's rivers. The contamination of water essential for the daily activities of thousands of people has resulted in an epidemic of cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, and other ailments. The city of Lago Agrio,founded in the 1960s as a base camp of Texaco, located in the Amazonian forest, The area around the city, the Lago Agrio oil field, has many ecological problems. The rainforest has been all but obliterated in this region and environmental degradation is severe, with catastrophic oil pollution in some areas.
