As dawn began to break in the Peruvian Amazon on March 5, an oil slick spread across the Puinahua River in the district of the same name, engulfing clumps of palms and reeds in a thick, black layer as it streamed down the current. The sight of the spill prompted a desperate rush among the riverside Manco Cápac community to prevent the oil from contaminating the river they depend on for their survival. “I woke up to chaos,” Kara Fikrig, a biologist with Cornell University who studies dengue in the region, told Mongabay. “People were out on their canoes, using their bare hands, using buckets to scoop up the oil. They had buckets full of this pure-looking crude petroleum oil.” The oil spill happened near Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, a protected area of rainforest, 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the PetroTal S.A. oil base in Lot 95 in Bretaña. Two barges belonging to Trans Fluvial Rey E.I.R.L. (known in the area as Transportes Henry or Grupo Henry) had collided while docking, causing the tanker carrying crude oil to leak. The oil spill happened approximately 2 km (1.2 mi) from PetroTal’s Lot 95 base, when two barges from Trans Fluvial Rey E.I.R.L. collided. The accident happened at around 5 a.m.; by 10 in the morning, there was a “high concentration” of oil streaming down the river, a tributary of the Amazon, an hour away from the spill site, Fikrig said. “It makes me believe it was quite a bit of that tanker…This article was originally published on Mongabay