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DENR keen in reopening mines in Marinduque

By atm.admin - Posted on July 20th, 2009


DENR keen in reopening mines in Marinduque

 

By Marvyn N. Benaning

 

Posted July 12, 2009 at www.mb.com.ph

 

BOAC, Marinduque – The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is keen in reopening the Marcopper mines in this island province and is seeking support from Gov. Jose Antonio “Bong” Carrion to win popular acceptance for the move.

 

DENR officials met with Carrion last week to assure him that the department will not be averse to the clean-up of the 26-kilometer Boac River, which sustained the worst damage when the Tapian mine tailings pit collapsed on March 24, 1996 and discharged millions of litres of contaminated waste into the river system and then on to the Philippine Sea.

 

Carrion is sensitive to the concerns of his constituents and said bioremediation and phytoremediation must be completed first before the people of Marinduque could even consider the proposal as environmentally sound.

 

DENR Undersecretary Eleazar Quinto is said to be responsive to the idea and is not bent on opposing any viable project to clean up the mess.

 

The destruction of the main river in Marinduque and six sub-river systems has been particularly deleterious to the livelihood of fishermen and farmers, many of whom have pending damage suits against Marcopper.

 

Two years ago, protesting farmers and fishermen supported by environmental groups demanded payment for the destruction caused by the 1996 calamity and reiterated they would oppose any move to reopen the mine, which operated for about 60 years and discharged more than 200 million tons of waste into the bay.

 

All riverine life in Marinduque has been slaughtered by the waste dumped by Marcopper and the levels of arsenic, cadmium, and copper are high, with agricultural land and sources of drinking water contaminated.

 

Local officials are also demanding quick reparation for the damage to the environment, along with more than a billion in taxes left unpaid by the shuttered company and its beneficial owner, Placer Dome Inc., a Canadian mining company.

 

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COMMENT RULES:

Hi everyone,

I'm the national coordinator of Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM), the owner of this site.

We will always respect views and opinions posted on this site, as much as we encourage open discussion and intelligent debate on the issue of mining. ATM has its stand on this issue very clearly, and we welcome the comments from those who do not agree with us.

However, we have observed that in the past few days, this forum has gone way beyond acceptable behavior of netiquette.

I will request and strongly encourage all posters to at least follow the following rules:

1. Be civil. Basic courtesy and privacy norms should be practised by posters in this forum. Make your mom at least proud by showing you still remember to be polite, even if you're not required to say "po" or "opo" in every post you make. We wouldn't mind that either, if you do so. Then again, I am assuming here that you're already an adult.

2. Personal attacks will not be tolerated. This also applies to flaming. Just in case you don't know what flaming is, its deliberately insulting or personally ranting against a poster (or a thread) simply because you are losing the arguments.

3. Avoid being anonymous. Since you have enough time to post long comments, you would at least have a few seconds to type even an alias. You also help people conclude that you are not a paid hack from a PR firm by Intex (or any other mining company)

4. Do not shout in the forums. Do not use ALL CAPS in your posts. A single exclamation point should also suffice.

We will observe the forum in the next few days. Should these rules be disregarded, we will transform this into a minimally-moderated forum. We hope we will avoid the situation that we will decide to make this a closely and strictly moderated forum. We value everyone's insights so much.

We'll check up again on this new rules after a short while. Of course, we expect the Intex ECC to be revoked in a few days. In this case, I suspect that the "excitement" in this thread would have died down.

Jaybee Garganera
National Coordinator
ATM
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