Newmont insists Buyat bay not contaminated

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Despite the results of a study by joint team that pointed to high levels of arsenic in Buyat bay, PT Newmont Minahasa Raya maintained on Tuesday that the bay was free of contamination.

Dave Baker, Newmont's senior vice president for environmental management, said that elevated levels of arsenic were to be expected in the tailings solid because of the mineralogy of the ore body.

"The tailings system was designed so that the arsenic would be in a safe chemically stable form that is locked into the sediment and not released into the environment," he said in a statement made available to The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Baker claimed that the system has worked as designed.

"It is confirmed by multiple previous scientific studies as well as 8 years of PT NMR monitoring data that show arsenic concentrations in seawater to be well below Indonesian and international seawater standards," he said.

Newmont, which operated in the area for six years up until Aug. 31, disposed of its tailings in Buyat Bay. It has maintained that the tailings had been detoxified.

The study by a joint team comprising government officials, police officers and representatives of non-governmental organizations suggested that the level of arsenic in sediments at the bottom of Buyat bay reached 666 mg/kg.

According to the 2004 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) marine water quality criteria, sediments are considered contaminated if their arsenic levels reach between 50 and 300 mg/kg.

The Office of the State Minister for the Environment has yet to issue the full results of the study, pending a ministerial meeting on Wednesday.

The ministry, however, has told Buyat residents in Minahasa, North Sulawesi, not to consume water from wells around the bay and to reduce their fish consumption.

Separately, Siti Maimunah of JATAM, a non-governmental organization dealing with mining operations, voiced concern that the government may ignore the results of the study for reasons of political expediency.

"We do hope that the government's political interests do not serve to undermine the facts. We're talking about the fate of the Buyat people here," she told the Post.

Siti, who was also a member of the joint team, said that there were no guarantees that the sediment, which contained arsenic and other heavy metals, was stable.

"How can they guarantee that the sediment is stable and will not release the arsenic into the sea? They did not even detoxify the tailings properly," she said.

Siti said that Newmont's claim that a thermocline layer, which would prevent the metals from rising to the surface, was present at the depth of 82 meters below sea level was not true.

"The thermocline lies at between 110 meters and 120 meters below sea level," siti said.