Avaliação da contaminação dos sedimentos do rio Iguaçu e Barigui por derivados do petróleo

Abstract

The anthropogenic activity can cause different environmental damages, being the use of petroleum one that. One of the more expressive kinds of pollution given by oil are the leaking of tanks, pipelines and leakage during transport. One of these was the accident occurred in 2000 in Saldanha stream, an affluent of Barigui River. This river flows toward Iguaçu river, in the city of Araucária, Paraná. At this occasion four million liters of oil leaked from Getúlio Vargas Refinery. Knowing that, the present study proposes to evaluate the condition of the rivers Barigui and Iguaçu thirteen years after the accident. For this purpose, it had been done samplings upstream and downstream in Barigui river, as well in the Iguaçu River, where samples were collected before and after the junction of Barigui. Those samples were analyzed for PAHs and n-alkanes, to verify if these components are still present in those places water and sediment, using for the analyses a GC/MS. In the water analyses weren’t found results above the detection limits of the equipment, being these results compatible with current researches done at those places and with the fact that these components tend to accumulate in sediments and soil. In sediment were found significant values for phenantranes, fluranthenes and pyrenes, suggesting that the source of these components is petrogenic. The n-alkanes found on the area weren’t sufficient to determine whether the source. Comparing the obtained results with similar researches from the disaster area, it suggests that those contaminants from the spilling weren’t completely degraded on nature, being still a source of contamination to the environment and aquatic organism.