"This mine cannot be allowed to ruin
our river"
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(AR) LONDON, England -- "Last week I saw the waters flowing past my
town turn a filthy brown. The cyanide waste came like a great brown slick
covering the water from the mine 80 miles upstream. The whole river turned
brown," Leon Carrington, one of the few eyewitness to the Omai gold mine
cyanide disaster in Guyana, told American Reporter News Bureau on his arrival in
London last night.
The river before the spill "was so rich," he said. "It is about a
mile wide. It was full of fine fish. Its waters were naturally black from
the rain forests. It had giant otters, dolphins, porpoises. It flowed
down between the mountains through the forest. Jaguars, deer, monkeys, all
drunk from it."
"When I traveled by boat towards the mouth of the river on my way
to the airport, there were dead fish everywhere. It made me sick to see
it," he continued. "Others told me they had seen dead pigs floating
belly-up down the river and even a dead crocodile, all poisoned by the
mine." Carrington comes from the Guayanese town of Bartica on the
Essequibo River, 60 miles south of the Omai gold mine, the source of the
cyanide.
"Please help us," he appealed. "This mine cannot be allowed to ruin
our river." His appeal for help was backed by Brennel Archer, the
political leader of Bartica, a town of 15,000, and of Region 7, a local
government entity that includes the Omai mine.
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Eyewitness account contradicts official report of no damage
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In a telephone
interview Carrington asked that sampling equipment
be made available to the Guyanese on an urgency basis so they can know
precisely how badly damaged their river is. Not only cyanide levels needs
to be tested, he said, but also the levels of heavy metals such as
mercury, cadmium and lead that are commonly found in effluent from gold
mines. He said many people felt reports from the mine's owners could not
be trusted.
The eyewitness account contradicts the report made last week by
the independent Canadian consultant brought in to assess the damage and
another by the Pan American Health Organization, both of which minimized
the damage. American chemists say the amount of cyanide measured in the
water was not sufficient to cause death in humans, and would quickly
evaporate.
Dr. Harry Blakowitz, president of Technitrol Eco-Research, in a
prelimary report on the spill, said that "over a distance of approximately
80 miles in the Essequibo River, no dead fish or animals were found" in
the area around Bartica.
"But even the local newspaper carried photographs of hundreds of
dead fish," Carrington responded.
"This report is not true. I saw dying fish taken from the river by
my town," said Archer, the Bartica official. The Associated Press
reported shoals of dead fish and dead hogs floating in the 600-mile-long
river near Bartica on August 22.
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Reports of dead fish floating 80 miles
downstream
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Dr. Blakowitz
suggested in his report that the fish has escaped
harm because of their agility. "It is quite likely that during the
initial spill ... fish may have avoided these potentially harmful
concentrations by swimming out of the effluent plume." His assessment
matches that of the deputy general manager of the mine, Claude Dumont, who
characterized the damage as "peanuts."
But a film of the dam burst shown on Britain's Channel 4 last week
showed a cataract surging over the whole width of the river that would
have been difficult for fish to evade.
The Balkowitz report stated that 3.4 million cubic meters, or 900
million gallons, of cyanide-laced water was released from the mine site
between Saturday August 19th and Thursday August 24th, or nearly the
entire contents of the mine's tailings ponds, and that this water
contained 25 to 30 parts per million of cyanide.
The World Health Organization sets the safe limit for drinking
water at 0.07 parts per million. Guyanese officials in Washington said the
natives in the region drink rain water, not river water. The official
U.S. safe limit is 0.15 parts per million. At its peak, over a million
gallons a minute was released, quadrupling the water volume of the Omai
tributary before sweeping down into the vastly larger Essequibo River.
The report further states that the river waters did not fully mix
for another 20 miles and then could be clearly seen from the air as the
mud from the tailings dam changed the color of the water. However, the
eyewitness accounts of dead fish report them floating another 60 miles
downstream.
The Guyana government has ordered that the river waters not be
used by the local inhabitants for any other purpose than washing clothes.
Chairman Archer told The American Reporter News Bureau that the river was their major
source of water. They had even been forbidden to wash in it. Likewise
they are not to eat its fish.
"The fish were beautiful to eat and very cheap before. Now we have
to import our food." Barbados and Jamaica have suspended imports of
Guyanese fish and shrimp.
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"The mine was hastily built, ill
planned and an example of greed masquerading as hope"
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It also emerges
that there is another side to the mining company's
claim that the Guyanese government is using the disaster to claim money
from the company.
Several months before the disaster, the company told the
government that because it had underestimated the amount of waste it would
produce, it would need to build a second tailings dam and partly because
of the cost would be unable to pay any royalties and taxes to the
government until the year 2002, just three years before the mine's is
expected to close. The news had reportedly caused dismay in government
circles. As Omai is the largest open pit gold mine in South America, the
government expected it to contribute substantially to its revenues.
The disaster only added fuel to an already difficult relationship.
Instead of being a source of revenues, the mine is now a cause of
more environmental expenditures for the government, whose foreign debt
sometimes consumes as much as 70 percent of its tax revenues.
There have been warnings of a disaster in the making for months.
In March, the operators of the mine warned that disposal of the waste
water was a problem, and prophetically suggested the mine might need to
close in August if no other way was found to deal with the waste. A small
spill occurred in May and in June the government announced an
investigation into whether company plans to discharge effluent into the
river were environmentally sound.
Roger Moody, the Mining Advisor to the Amerindian People's
Association of Guyana (APA) and the author of several works assessing the
socio-economic impact of mining projects, was invited to Guyana last
December by the APA, who expressed concern about earlier reported pollution
incidents at Omai.
He was unable to get permission to visit the site. He told
American Reporter News Bureau yesterday that "the mine was hastily built, ill
planned and an example of greed masquerading as the hope of a poor
country." The mine is a subsidiary of Invesco, Inc., a Denver,
Colorado-based mutual fund giant. Among that company's outside directors
is the CEO of Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games.
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Heavy metal pollution not considered
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Moody warned
that the Canadian report on the presence of iron and
copper forms of cyanide in the effluent indicated "the presence of
dangerous heavy metals, a hazard not previously mentioned." He noted that
Technitro Eco-Research was only instructed to look at cyanide pollution,
but arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium are also common waste products in
tailing effluent produced by gold mines.
"These pollutants are normally trapped in the sludge in tailings
ponds but, given the force of the flood waters from the breached dam, some
are almost certain to have been swept into the river," he explained. "Any
heavy metals so released would inflict greater damage than cyanide for
they do not decay over time but instead are concentrated in fish and in
the consumers of the fish." The observation in the Balkowitz report that
a mud plume from the dam could be seen for miles downstream amounts to a
confirmation that any heavy metal pollutants in the mud were also
released, he said.
The Canadian engineering company Knight Piesold hired by Omai Gold
Mine to build the tailings dam say they were very embarrassed by being
associated with the failure.
"The company has built hundreds of tailings dams and this is the
first time something has happened like this," a company spokesman said.
However, the firm believes that Omai further developed the tailings dam
after Knight Piesold left the project, raising the walls from the 25
metres state Knight Piesold had designed to a height of 45 metres.
The initial cyanide spill in May was reported as being due to a
power failure which had prevented sluice gates from being closed. This
suggests that the gates were already open at the time of the failure,
perhaps for a deliberate controlled discharge of effluent.
Such a deliberate release is entirely plausible. Omai Mines had
intended from the very first to release overflows from the polluted
tailings dam into the river in its original Environmental Impact Statement
to the previous Guyanese government. The current government apparently
inherited a tacit agreement to this controlled release, along with a five
percent equity share in the mine.
A major force in bringing the mine to reality was Canadian mining
investor Robert Friedland, who at the time was reeling from a gold mine's
tailings dam disaster at Summitville, Indiana, the most expensive such
failure in the U.S. in recent times.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that the
final cost of clearing up the cyanide and heavy metal pollution at the
Summitville mine will be about $120 million. Friedland is still wanted for
questioning by the EPA.
After the Summitville disaster, Friedlan invested in Omai Gold
Mines Ltd. through Golden Star Resources, the subsidiary of Canadian-based
Cambior, Inc. and Invesco, which operates a $9 billion mutual fund
specialized in high-risk securities from "emerging nations." Golden Star
Resources is now a 35 participant participant in the mine. Friedland is
now believed to have sold his holding in the Omai mine and to have moved
on to establishing one of the world's largest new gold mines on Lihir
Island in Papua New Guinea.
The Guyanese government, supported by the parliamentary
opposition, has now forbidden the Omai mine to reopen until a Commission
of Inquiry has established the appropriate safety standards for it. The
largest investment project in Guyana is expected to reopen in six months.
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