.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&crop=3%3A2&ssl=1 "Revealed: Toxic old Iraqi oil barrels being sold as water tanks")
This article first appeared on our partner site, Independent Arabia
Haider, a father of three from a village in the rural area of Iraq known for its proximity to marshlands, stands beside a large blue barrel in his courtyard.
“The cheapest water tank I could get my hands on”, he states as he remembers buying it four years ago from a scrapyard on the road leading to the oil fields in Maysan. The seller had told him they were “clean and washed oil company barrels, suitable for storing water”.
As time passed, Haider began to notice that the water would smell different on hot days. He also observed a thin film that clung to the inside of the barrel despite repeated washing. Yet financial constraints silenced his fears, as buying a new tank would mean spending money he simply did not have.
Haider says he only became aware of how dangerous the barrel was when he heard about warnings issued by environmental activists in Maysan that the barrels that had come from oil fields were originally intended for chemicals.
The warnings made it clear that washing the barrels was insufficient to remove traces of those substances.
Speaking to Independent Arabia, he recounts: “At that moment, I realised that everything I had been hearing about in the news about the dangers of commercial waste was not far away in the marsh or in the field; it was standing right at my doorstep.”
Although Haider now tries to use the barrel for non-drinking purposes only, he admits that for several years, it would store the water his children drank daily.
He has no way of knowing whether the container, once used in an oil field, had introduced any of that world into their bodies.
“I wake up in horror every day seeing the two barrels in front of me. I want to cry. What have I done to myself? What have I done to my children? Should I expect our cancer diagnoses any day?”
A worker at a Chinese oil company provides a detailed account of how chemical barrels make their way from the oil fields into people’s lives.
For years, some Chinese employees and local contractors have been selling these barrels and tankers outside the field gates, usually for money and sometimes through local barter arrangements.
He adds that some oil police officers at checkpoints, sometimes with good intentions, encourage residents to use the barrels for storing drinking water, swimming and washing, granting them a kind of “social legitimacy,” while the residues clinging to the interior walls remain completely unaccounted for.
Engineer “Ahmed”, a pseudonym, from the Maysan Environmental Directorate, explains that washing these barrels does not remove the danger, as some of the substances remain attached to the plastic or metal surface and gradually leach into the stored water.
