Gold mining pollutes environment around national park

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.