Gold mines, a city's pride, leave toxic legacy

[GLT]

Gold mines, a city's pride, leave toxic legacy
By JENNY GROSSAP posted: 12:52 PM 03/26/11



RANDFONTEIN, South Africa -When it rains in the shantytown of Tudor
Shaft, the streets pool with orange water that smells like vinegar.
Experts say the water contains radioactive minerals and has killed all
aquatic life in a nearby river.

Tudor Shaft takes its name, and its troubles, from an abandoned gold
mine.

It's just a fraction of the toxic but long-overlooked legacy of South
Africa's most famous industry. Mining accounts for 17 percent of
everything South Africa produces, and the country is the world's
fourth biggest exporter, sitting on a mother lode that runs for miles
from Johannesburg into the countryside.

Social campaigners, preoccupied first with overthrowing apartheid and
then with raising living standards for a badly neglected black
majority, are now waking up to the environmental cause. The effects of
mining are the focus of parliamentary debate and newspaper stories.
But no one is yet taking responsibility or funding a cleanup that
would probably put a dent in profits.

Johannesburg literally sits on a gold mine. Flat-topped heaps of mined
earth are backdrops to skyscrapers and bridges. FNB Stadium, the main
arena in last year's World Cup soccer tournament, sits at the foot of
a mine dump. Johannesburg's amusement park is called Gold Reef City
and features a ride that plunges into a mine shaft.

The city of 3.2 million grew out of the gold bonanza discovered in the
early 1900s. Nowadays, whenever a mining company removes one of the
270 dumps around Johannesburg to reprocess the waste, heritage
advocates complain that the city is losing a piece of its patrimony.

The worst environmental effects are felt in places like Tudor Shaft,
25 miles (40 kilometers) from the city. Here, Patrick Mkoyo's children
run barefoot, their feet tinted orange from contaminated sand. He says
they sometimes come home with rashes or breathing difficulties.

"They are not OK here, but I don't have a choice; I have no other
place to stay," says Mkoyo, 35, as he stirs a family lunch of cornmeal
porridge in his immaculately kept shack.

The doctors tell him they don't know what is causing the children's
medical problems. But Chris Busby, a professor from Northern Ireland's
University of Ulster, thinks he has the likely answer.

In December he tested the soil around Mkoyo's shack and found it
contained at least 32 times the amount of radioactivity allowed by
government regulators. Busby prepared the report for the Federation
for Sustainable Environment, a private Johannesburg group working to
bring the toxic water issue to public attention.

According to Terence McCarthy, a minerals professor at Johannesburg's
University of Witwatersrand, radioactivity comes from uranium traces
in mined rock which lies in dumps until rain flushes it into the
ground and river systems.

Acidic water dissolves and liquefies metals in the mining rock,
including uranium, says Anthony Turton, a professor of environmental
management at University of the Free State. Liquefied uranium, toxic
and radioactive, flows out of the mines, he says.

The water can be so acidic that it eliminates river wildlife, Turton
says.

The problem hasn't yet reached Johannesburg itself, but one mining
basin in the city has already overflowed, and one of the next to
overflow is under the city center, experts say.

Aside from Tudor Shaft, other parts of the city's outskirts are
feeling the damage of toxic mine water, entering rivers and
communities at an increasing rate with heavy rain in recent months,
says Mariette Liefferink, chief executive of the Federation for
Sustainable Environment, a private group. Yellow-tinted grass, orange
mud and lifeless rivers plague sections of western Johannesburg, as
well as Soweto, one of South Africa's largest townships.

No studies have been done on how exposure to the water affects health,
Liefferink says, but scientific reports have documented its
destructive effects on the ecosystem, soil and water.

Peter Cronshaw, a mineral economics consultant for Tegritas Financial
Services, said the cost of a cleanup would accelerate South Africa's
already declining mining industry, particularly for smaller companies,
but it wouldn't affect the global gold industry. The country's
diminishing supply of gold means an increasing number of derelict
mines.

South Africa produced 206 of the 2,652 metric tons of gold mined
globally in 2010, says Philip Newman, the research director of London-
based GFMS Ltd., which researches precious metals. Its production
ranks fourth behind China, Australia and the U.S.

While abandoned mines everywhere produce toxic runoff, the problem is
most threatening in South Africa, Turton says. Johannesburg, unlike
most mining cities, is densely populated and an economic hub. On top
of that, Turton says, the mining industry in South Africa has gone
largely unregulated.

The apartheid rulers relied on the steady stream of income from
booming gold prices to offset international economic sanctions over
the treatment of blacks. "There's been little oversight from
government, and mining companies have done nothing about it — for 120
years they've had a party," Turton said.

Environmental NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, got off to a
late start on mining because past governments, while aware of toxic
mine water's impact, sought to keep the public in ignorance, he said.

"Under apartheid, there was absolutely no tolerance of any NGO
activity at all," Turton said. "When there was activity, it had to do
very much with bringing down the apartheid state."

Now, the post-apartheid government is under pressure to hold companies
accountable, while the companies deny responsibility.

"Most of the toxic water that flows into rivers come from abandoned
mine sites which have no owners and thus the responsibility to put
into place water pollution control measures lie with the state," says
Nikisi Lesufi, senior executive of the Chamber of Mines, an industry
group.

Cronshaw, the consultant, says most gold mining companies don't even
have titles to the mines that are the source of toxic water.

"The mining companies say: These mines were here long before we were
and they weren't our mines; our companies are subsidiaries. The
government allowed them to do this, therefore it has got to sort it
out," Cronshaw says.

AngloGold Ashanti Ltd., the South African mining giant, says it
expects the government will "lead the process of national
coordination" on handling toxic water and that the company already
contributes to pumping water from one defunct shaft outside of
Johannesburg. In a statement, spokesman Alan Fine said AngloGold mine
dumps do not contain much groundwater.

Mining company Anglo American tracks water quality and is devising a
national water-cleansing strategy for itself, spokesman Pranill
Ramchander said in an e-mail.

In the U.S., mine companies have been under tight regulation for
decades. R. Larry Grayson, professor of energy and mineral engineering
at Penn State University, recalls that a U.S. mine he worked at in the
1970s was fined $10,000 on the spot because of one dead fish found.

Sputnik Ratau. the government's spokesman on water and environmental
affairs, says dangerous mine waste is a "high priority," but
acknowledges it was not given serious attention until the government
set up a committee to study the issue in September.

"Acid mine drainage is toxic water, and if it flows into rivers, it
obviously contaminates rivers and underground waters, which become not
a healthy source of drinking for humans, animals, plants — all living
organisms," he said.

"Because the necessary steps were not taken from day one," Ratau said,
South Africans "are now reaping what you would call the misfortune of
the benefit that we had from the legacy of mining in this country."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
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