Gold mining pollutes environment around national park

Jakarta Post contributor Rebecca Mowbray visited Tanjung Puting National Park on a recent journey through Kalimantan. The following are her articles and photos of the environmental condition in the area.

TANJUNG PUTING, Central Kalimantan (JP): Alongside Tanjung Puting National Park, speedboats crammed with people tear through the tranquility of the nature reserve and the muddy waters of the Sekoyner River.

Their destination is Gedung Sintuk, a five-month-old illegal gold mine a few kilometers upstream from the orangutan park, one of scores of homegrown mining operations throughout Kalimantan and among five near Tanjung Puting.

A predecessor of Gedung Sintuk had been legal until its village cooperative permit expired in November 1995. Since then, the number of people involved in mining, the expansion to new sites along the Sekoyner River, and unsafe environmental practices have made these mines unfit candidates for permit renewal. The existence of Gedung Sintuk and others underscores that a national park is affected by the economic and environmental conditions outside of its borders.

In only a few months, villagers have ripped out a kilometer of the cool green canopy and created a desert in the middle of the forest. It is hot, perhaps 100 degrees, and the midday sun reflects off white sand made even brighter by specks of mercury from the gold mining operation.

The naked land is pocked with a half dozen craters that are the gold mines. The largest, located close to the river, is a wide but shallow pit a football field in length and perhaps 10 meters deep. Its edges are charred with the remnants of burnt underbrush.

Inside, several teams of men stand thigh-deep in water, bracing themselves as they train bright blue hoses of river water against the sides of the crater. While two men blast the sand with water, two others rake the loosened earth into the pool of water so a man directing another blue tube can suck the sludge out of the pit for gold prospecting later in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, another member of the team hacks at a stubborn root with his machete to allow the sand beneath to be sifted for gold.

Removing roots makes the already fragile edges of the sand pit even more unstable. In another pit, as a worker climbed out of the pit, the sand gave way under his foot and showered into the pit, nearly taking him with it.

Landslides are common. Our guide, 22-year-old Yadi, worked at Gedung Sintuk for a month before eschewing the heat of the gold pit for work as a deckhand on a river boat. He said that men are killed by landslides regularly and he witnessed two men killed in separate landslides on one day alone

Mining at Gendung Sintuk is men's work. An estimated 400 men work at Gedung Sintuk in teams of six, digging everyday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and sluicing from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Another 600 men work at the other illegal mines along the Sekoyner River.

Women stay in the village of wooden houses and bright colored tarps strung over wooden frames next to the mines. There they cook for the men and look after the many small children so they do not fall into the pits. A few have become entrepreneurs selling vegetables and provisions for the settlement.

The men are dressed in their skivvies, their skin tanned dark by the sun. Most wear baseball caps to shield their eyes from the light, often with wet t-shirts hung over their heads and around their necks to keep them cool.

The t-shirts also protect the miners' ears against the noise, which is deafening. Scores of engines and generators crack the air like jackhammers as they pull water in from the river and suck the sludge through the blue tubes, up the scaffolding made of sticks, to the slides for washing and sifting.

Near the slides, a team of men has already started testing their sand for gold. They swish the sludge with water in a wooden tub and strain it to finer proportions, then add mercury to help separate out the gold. The miner with the mercury bottle said his team goes through a kilo of mercury a month.

Even if the miner knew the mercury was dangerous, his lust for gold washed him of any concerns.

Is the mercury safe?

"Never mind," he replied in Indonesian.

But if you ingest it?

"We don't eat it."

What if the mercury ends up in the river and you drink the water from the river or eat the fish that swim in the river?

"Never mind."

Mercury, which causes neurological disorders and complications for pregnant women, does find its way into the river. A 1995 study by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), before gold mining operations reached their current intensity, found that the concentration of mercury in the nearby Sekoyner River was 0.093 mg per liter. The limit for B-grade water, or water that is drinkable after boiling, is 0.001 mg of mercury per liter of water.

Miners say they usually find 10-20 grams of gold per day, which sells for Rp 25,000 a gram in nearby Kumai and is split among the team members. At least some people in the boomtown of Gedung Sintuk are making money, for two six-foot satellite dishes and many small television antenna stand as testimony to their newfound wealth and their intent to stay.

Some of the miners say they're veterans, lured from other mines by the promise of gold here. Others have uprooted themselves and their families from agricultural or logging work for the prospect of better earnings. Still others are transmigrants who have yet to settle into stable and productive employment.

But in this particular wash there was no gold. The miners and a woman and child were disappointed, but one miner shrugged it off and said there was other gold in the pit.

Economic opportunities in the Kumai-Pangkalanbun area are scant. Most people make their living from extracting natural resources, such as timber, palm oil, rubber or more recently, gold.

Rumors abound that the Gedung Sintuk mine may be shut down after the May 29 elections, but Tanjung Puting National Park officials say that closing the mine is difficult if local authorities cannot steer the miners toward other employment. A previous attempt to shut down the mine, a Tanjung Puting official said, gobbled up the local patrol budget and ultimately proved fruitless.

Meanwhile, the Gedung Sintuk miners, possessed by the same hope of striking gold as international commercial mining operations, continue to dig. And Tanjung Puting sits as an oasis beyond the polluted Sekoyner River and holes in the forest on the other side.