Gold Mines, a City's Pride, Leave Toxic Legacy
RANDFONTEIN, South Africa (AP) - 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, 40 kilometers (25 miles) 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. …
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, 40 kilometers (25 miles) 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. …
Comments
Post a Comment