Home ›

Fact-finding body confirms illegal mining, illegal road construction inside Butuan Watershed Area

By atm.admin - Posted on July 5th, 2009

Fact-finding body confirms illegal mining, illegal road construction inside Butuan Watershed areaBy Ben Serrano

 Posted at www.pna.gov.ph

BUTUAN CITY, July 2 (PNA) - The government and civilian organizations (CO) fact finding team found positive allegations of illegal operations inside the restricted Butuan City Watershed areas.The team visited the site and investigated alleged illegal mining, illegal cutting of trees and illegal construction of road inside the 4,367.44-hectare government-declared watershed.

In its six-page initial report dated June 9, 2009, the team recommended to: 1) request the Philippine Air Force to use two helicopters for further on-the-spot checks in case the Butuan City government would not allow the team to pass through the Taguibon-Malinhawod road section located within the watershed area.

2)Request the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to clear and secure the watershed areas from Barangay Anticala and Malinhawod (particularly areas 7 and 9) and request the Philippine National Police (PNP) to escort the team in the conduct of site visitation.

3)Request concerned government agencies to continue the conduct of thorough and impartial investigation following confirmed illegal road construction, illegal mining and cutting of trees in the area.

But the report did not recommend filing of charges against the perpetrators/masterminds in said illegal operations nor officially identified them.

The team also recommended a stop to all ongoing illegal projects in the watershed area such as widening of roads, quarrying, graveling since the area affected was a proclaimed watershed area.

It also recommended identification of the owner of heavy equipment such as dump trucks and backhoe seen by the team during their ocular visit at the watershed area while asking the Department of Transportation and Communication-Land Transportation Office to verify, identify plate numbers of said heavy equipment.The report was signed by officials of various government agencies and representative from the Catholic-led Caraga Conference for Peace and Development (CCPD).

The team also discovered hauling of mineral ores and illegally cut logs from the watershed area.The team is composed of officials, representatives from government agencies like, the National Commission on Indigenous People (NCIP), DENR, Mines and Geo-Sciences Bureau, Environmental Management Bureau, National Economic Development Authority (NEDA), CENRO-Butuan, Environment and Natural Resources Office-LGU Butuan City, Office of the City Mayor, Roman Catholic-led Caraga Conference for Peace and Development (CCPD) and the BCWD.

In 2007 and later part of 2008 and early this year, Butuan City Water District (BCWD) personnel discovered rampant cutting of trees and blasting for mining exploration in the watershed area.They claimed they reported the matter to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Butuan City government and other concerned government agencies. (PNA)LAP/wi/Ben Serrano/ebp

http://www.pna.gov.ph/index.php?&sid=6&pfn=215168&arch=1&go=Go&search_arch=mining&andor=and&mdte_arch=0&ddte_arch=0&ydte_arch=0&nga_Session=e14075e55dd84b29c4125fe8176b0fac 

Bookmark/Search this post with:
Your rating: None
Tagged:

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

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
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

Image CAPTCHA
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.