At least 60,000 litres of oil has spilled from the Brazilian oil company Transpetro into Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay and the nearby Estrela river.
The company said the 4km spill was caused by thieves who broke into a pipeline last week. The cleaning process has started and the workers have cleared most of the oil but the biologist said it would be weeks until the extent of the damage to local wildlife would be known.
Earlier in January 2000, Guanabara Bay was also the site of a major spill when a pipeline released 1,300,000 litres of oil. The leak arose from an oil refinery operated by Petrobras.
[source_without_link]BBC[/source_without_link]