---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: [Lingk] Bag.1-Newmont:The High Cost of Gold-DenverPost From: "Estee-FoE Indonesia-WALHI" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, December 20, 2004 1:33 pm
Artikel ini merupakan bagian pertama dari seri artikel mengenai Newmont operasi Newmont di segala penjuru dunia yang dimuat Denver Post. Koran No.1 di kampung halaman Newmont di Denver. Namun untuk selengkapnya, kunjungi situsnya dengan klik link yang tersedia untuk membaca artikel lebih mendalam lengkap dengan rekaman video temuan sang jurnalis, berbagai grafik serta lebih dari 15 buah foto. Salam, Estee (Komunikasi Internasional--WALHI) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Article Published: Sunday, December 12, 2004 http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~34165~2592207,00.html newmont The high cost of gold Denver-based mining giant Newmont gleams on Wall Street. But the company is tarnished by a troubled environmental record. By Michael Riley and Greg Griffin Denver Post Staff Writers Lone Tree Mine, Nev. - Joel Lenz steps onto an observation deck near a desolate stretch of Interstate 80 and gazes down into a crater 600 feet deep and 1,800 feet wide - a stunning testament to Newmont Mining Corp.'s power to move mountains. Far below, giant drills pierce holes in rock that will be crumbled by explosives. Massive shovels load earth onto dump trucks, which carry it to a mound where sprinklers will spray it with millions of gallons of cyanide and water. From each 200-ton load of rock and ore, Denver-based Newmont, the world's largest gold producer, will extract an average of about $1,800 worth of gold - enough to make wedding bands for a dozen brides. "I'm very proud of what we do here," said Lenz, manager of Newmont's Lone Tree Mine and a Nevada native who's raising a family in nearby Battle Mountain. "We work hard to make this a model operation." Villagers near Newmont's foreign mines, environmental groups and others say the company's operations are anything but a model. Throughout the world, in many places where Newmont uses its heavy machinery and cyanide- extraction process to disgorge the gleaming metal that symbolizes love and wealth, problems follow. From Nevada to Indonesia to Peru to Turkey, Newmont is battling accusations of misdeeds ranging from contaminating land and water to misusing its power with local governments and disrupting communities. In lawsuits, internal company documents, regulatory filings and dozens of interviews, The Denver Post found significant environmental failures at Newmont's mines across the globe, including Lone Tree in Nevada. Former employees complain that Newmont downplays or ignores environmental concerns raised within the company and in some cases retaliates against people who voice them. In a decade-long campaign of acquisition and aggressive exploration, Newmont has climbed to the top of the gold industry. It employs 13,500 people around the world, including 300 in Colorado. It had revenues of $3.2 billion and produced more than 200 tons of gold last year. With gold prices high and demand soaring, publicly traded Newmont has positioned itself as a Wall Street darling and a popular way to invest in a booming market. Newmont says it applies the same rigorous environmental standards under which it operates in the United States to its mining in other countries. "We hear this accusation that we're exporting pollution because we can't do business in the U.S. I can tell you right now that's nonsense," said David Baker, Newmont's chief environmental scientist. "Our goal and objective is to do it right, not cut corners, and to take the levels of protection we use in the U.S. wherever we go in the world." Critics, including former employees of the gold giant, say Newmont doesn't take environmental standards seriously enough anywhere it operates. "They say that safety is their No. 1 concern and that the environment is their No. 2, but that isn't what they practice," said Sandra Ainsworth, an environmental compliance officer at Lone Tree who claims she was fired in April 2002 after reporting environmental problems to managers. "There are companies out there that are willing to say the law is the law," she said. "Newmont is just powerful, and so they're more willing to say, 'We don't have to do this if we don't want to."' Among The Post's findings: In Nevada, Newmont violated water-quality standards at the Lone Tree mine for at least four years, releasing greater- than-permitted quantities of contaminants such as arsenic and boron, according to the mine's own monitoring reports. Ainsworth and another employee say they were fired after they took environmental problems at the mine to their bosses. Later, Newmont temporarily blocked a state investigation into the issue. In Turkey, a former Newmont manager said the company's Ovacik mine near the Aegean coast had operated illegally and without the necessary environmental permits for at least two years before being shut down by Turkish courts in August. When he publicized the mine's problems, Newmont sued him for defamation. The mine's doctor resigned, claiming Newmont was falsifying accident reports and inflating the operation's safety record. In Indonesia, Newmont may soon face criminal charges related to its Minahasa mine, where it is accused of polluting Buyat Bay and sickening local villagers. Newmont said in a 2001 environmental risk assessment that it could not rule out the possibility of metals from mine waste traveling up the food chain to humans. Newmont now says new research shows that can't happen. Also in Indonesia, a confidential company review - one conducted in 2001 to take a hard look at environmental issues at its major mines - determined that equipment that was supposed to clean mercury from smokestack exhaust leaving the Minahasa processing plant often malfunctioned or was turned off. That allowed toxic mercury fumes to escape into the air, people familiar with the document say. In Peru, that same review found that the mine's sediment controls were vastly inadequate and that the mine repeatedly poured sediment laced with heavy metals and other contaminants into streams. The mine's cyanide treatment facilities, including a treatment plant and holding ponds, were too small and sometimes released more cyanide than permitted into waterways, the internal review said. The urgency of the problem was highlighted by the company's insurer, which around the same time found that a sustained storm might lead to a significant cyanide spill at the mine, insiders say. The 2001 review is described by some of those who read it as an early warning of environmental and safety concerns, some of which have since become public. A year before Lone Tree employees raised public concerns about the dumping of contaminants into Nevada waterways, for example, Newmont's internal review highlighted those problems for senior company managers. But the problem wasn't fixed until after it became public. While conceding that the 2001 review identified serious issues, Newmont chief executive Wayne Murdy also said the process showed Newmont's own commitment to improve its record after a major mercury spill in Peru in 2000. Murdy provided a memo to The Post from March 2001 that shows the review team was given wide leeway to examine problems at any company mine. The results were reported directly to the company's senior-most management. Among other things, the review found that "upset events" dumped cyanide-laced water into Peruvian streams and released airborne mercury from a mine in Indonesia, Newmont's Baker said. Neither of those contaminants posed a serious risk to human health, he said, because the toxins were quickly diluted and the releases were over a short period. Since the 2001 review, the company has spent $173 million on environmental improvements at Peru's Yanacocha mine, including improved sediment controls and expanded capacity for a cyanide-treatment plant, Baker said. "The issues we faced with the growth of Yanacocha in 2000- 2001 do not exist today," he said. "We have managed the issues and put the appropriate systems in place." Newmont's Murdy adds that the company brings strong benefits to the countries where it mines. These include jobs, tax revenue, money spent on materials and construction and charitable contributions. The company also has added roads, sewage systems and health clinics and paid for medical operations for poor children, he says. Downplaying problems Concerns discovered by a review in Peru were minimized to the board. Inside the company, the 2001 internal review created significant concerns about environmental failures at Newmont operations throughout the world. Some high-level managers were convinced the company had failed to meet its promise to investors and communities to use the highest environmental standards wherever it operated. This led to a controversy about how much information should be shared with Newmont's board of directors. Moeen Qureshi, a former prime minister of Pakistan who served on Newmont's board until last year, said an account of the Peruvian portion of the internal review shared with the board in summer 2001 was too optimistic. He said that he and review team members asked for a second, more detailed presentation, which was given to the board two months later. The Peruvian portion of the review was especially controversial because it confirmed some long-standing complaints from environmental groups and local communities. Villagers had long complained about contaminated water and dying fish. Publicly, Newmont insisted that it was putting safety measures in place and that it was meeting its permit requirements. As the mine quickly expanded in the late 1990s, controls designed to limit sediment flowing into nearby rivers did not work properly, leading to massive dumping of sediment into rivers and streams, the internal review found. Data uncovered by the review team found that fish had almost entirely disappeared from one creek leaving the mine in a period of less than three years. In other cases, the 2001 review found problems that outside critics had missed. At Newmont's Minahasa mine in Indonesia, environmentalists accused the company of polluting a nearby bay. The internal review of Minahasa's operations pointed to other issues, including that the mine's processing plant was not always using its mercury-removing scrubbers. Baker said the scrubbers weren't required when the company built the plant. Newmont added them voluntarily for an extra measure of safety, he said, and generally used the plant to process ore with lower mercury content. Emissions standards were tightened later, and critics say that Newmont never re-evaluated its use of the pollution-control equipment. They also say the dangers of airborne mercury should have led the company to use the equipment in any case. Whistle-blower charges In Nevada, Newmont halted regulators' interviews with employees for two months. In its annual reports and on its website, Newmont says that it takes U.S. environmental standards with it around the world. Critics say that statement is more telling than the company intends. In Nevada - the world's third-largest gold mining region behind South Africa and Australia - Newmont is the biggest gold miner. It's also the second-biggest polluter measured in toxic chemicals released into the environment. Newmont dumped approximately 8.6 million pounds of what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency labels "persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals" throughout Nevada in 2002. Those releases weren't necessarily illegal; the great majority were naturally occurring chemicals in rock and ore that are dug up and exposed as part of the mining process. But the company's quarterly monitoring reports at its Nevada-based Lone Tree mine also show repeated violations of state and federal pollution standards in what former employees assert is a willingness to push the limits of environmental regulation there. Monitoring data provided to The Denver Post by an environmental watchdog group show that the mine regularly exceeded state standards for arsenic and other contaminants in water discharged into the Humboldt River between 1998 and 2002. Newmont managers interrupted a whistle-blower probe into those and other problems at the mine two years ago, stopping regulators after one interview from talking to other employees. It took two months of legal wrangling between Newmont and the state attorney general before authorities could return. The two Newmont employees who complained about the contamination, Ainsworth and Rebecca Sawyer, claimed in a later lawsuit that Newmont fired them after they repeatedly alerted supervisors to the mine's environmental problems. Among their allegations, the women say the company ignored permitting standards, lied to regulators and failed to perform required environmental monitoring. Newmont officials deny those accusations and say the women were laid off for economic reasons. Former Newmont executives say the Lone Tree case betrays a troubling weakness in the company's approach to environmental oversight. Ainsworth said her experience was a hard lesson in management attitudes that, she contends, focus on bottom lines and bonuses rather than strict environmental compliance. According to the women's lawsuit, Sawyer told her bosses in 2001 that the mine was dumping water high in a toxic form of ammonia into a nearby watershed, violating its permit. Instead of fixing the problem, a manager ticked off a series of other unreported violations and told Sawyer that environmental "compliance is not a driving force for Newmont," the suit claims. Newmont says it takes compliance very seriously and has since fixed the ammonia problem. Later that year, workers at Lone Tree discovered that storm water was reacting with rocks lining a drainage ditch to create sulfuric acid that was spreading in a wide plume onto public land. Rather than report it immediately as required by law, the lawsuit says that managers waited seven months, and that one initially told Ainsworth they would make "a risk-based decision" on whether to inform regulators. "Now I realize they were evaluating the risk of being caught," Ainsworth said. John Mudge, Newmont's environmental chief for North America, denied Ainsworth's claim. He said the company notified the state as soon as it discovered the problem and replaced the acid-generating rocks with limestone within several months. Investigators said that many of the women's charges - including the reporting delay - were impossible to verify. Because of the two-month delay while Newmont blocked the probe, regulators had "lost the element of surprise, which is often times critical in investigations," the state's final report noted. Newmont said it was only looking after the interest of its workers. "Our primary interest was to let them see all they wanted. Give them access to all the records, but to protect our employees," Mudge said. "Their desire to interview employees named by former employees was a concern to us." But regulators were able to verify the most serious allegation - that the mine was dumping contaminated water into northern Nevada's Humboldt River - because they had known about it for years. The violations had shown up in quarterly monitoring reports, said Valerie King, a senior investigator for the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. She said the agency had been in talks with the mine for several years about a solution. Newmont doesn't deny the violations and says it took steps to alleviate them, including agreeing to build additional water-treatment facilities. Mudge said the problem resulted from naturally occurring minerals in water from wells used to keep the mine pit dry, not as a byproduct of the gold-extraction process. But the company did not solve the problem until after former employees filed a complaint with Nevada authorities. If Newmont had been fined the maximum allowable under law for each day it violated water-quality standards, the company would have faced a $67 million penalty, according to an estimate by Great Basin Mine Watch, an environmental group. Acting a year after the problem was publicly reported by Ainsworth and Sawyer, the state agency fined Newmont $5,000. "We wanted to send a message that we were serious," King said. But a larger fine "was not consistent with the way we do business." Operating sans permits In Turkey, Newmont understated levels of cyanide in water leaving the mine. Its gates closed and the massive equipment now idle, the quiet of the Ovacik mine in Turkey belies the political and legal storm that has swirled around the project for at least a decade. Since 1994, the mine has been mired in a legal battle with local villagers over the use of cyanide to extract gold from the yellow-brown soil of the Aegean coast. It finally was shut down by the Turkish Supreme Court in August. Newmont said it believes the closure is only temporary, and told investors in October that the mine may be up and running again by year's end. But former employees said the recent court decision is just the most public of the mine's failures. A former senior manager said the company operated the mine for two years aware it didn't have necessary permits and is misrepresenting the amount of cyanide released into its tailings dam. A former doctor at the mine said Newmont downplayed the mine's injury rate, risking the health and safety of miners. The mine's former manager of government relations, Hasan G�kvardar, said his life has been threatened because of his willingness to publicize the mine's problems. And the company's doctor, Eser Yalman, resigned in protest last year. For Newmont's defenders - including economists, industry analysts and some lawyers - the Ovacik mine shows the difficulty of doing business in Turkey, a country still far less developed than its European neighbors. The company has had to cope with ambiguous or incomplete regulations and has been caught up in a political fight between the country's courts and parliament. Though conceding that the company faced some ill will from villagers when Newmont acquired the mine through a merger in February 2002, Chris Anderson, Newmont's head of external relations, said the situation has dramatically improved. Of the alleged death threats against G�kvardar, Newmont said that the company instructed mine employees angry about the closure not to retaliate against the mine's opponents. "We worked very hard to build on the Turkish love of gold, and the fact that this was gold coming from this region, and we turned around local opinion," Anderson said. Anderson also recalls G�kvardar, whose job at the mine was to obtain the necessary government permits: "He was the longest-standing employee. He worked for 11 years very hard to get the mine going." But in early 2002, G�kvardar stood up at a meeting that included Anderson and other Newmont executives and explained that the mine's legal status was in disarray. Many of the mine's permits had either been canceled or had expired, he said. He claims he later told Ovacik's Turkish managers that the mine might have to close for as long as a year until the proper permits could be obtained - which Newmont denies. The mine continued to extract gold, and by October of that year, G�kvardar said, his job was eliminated. In a telephone interview, G�kvardar said Newmont has used its political connections and the eagerness of the country's government for foreign exchange to sidestep Turkish law. In sworn testimony in Turkey last year, G�kvardar testified that the mine's tailings dam didn't meet Environment Ministry standards, that mining tunnels had bored beneath the mosque of a nearby village, and that many of the foreign workers didn't have visas. He provided letters to The Post from the Turkish Ministries of Health and of Public Works showing that, in 2003, Newmont lacked at least three key permits. The same year, the mine processed more than 3 tons of gold worth more than $30 million. Simon Booth, Newmont's manager of the Ovacik mine, said the health department permit wasn't needed to operate and said the others were canceled improperly by the local governor. Although the mine has been shut down at least twice by the courts, it has been vigorously defended by Turkey's central government. In 2000, a ministerial decree cited a study by a group of government researchers showing the company has taken sufficient measures and that the mine was safe. G�kvardar said the central government's support has been misplaced, especially since Newmont has lied to it about the seriousness of its impacts on the environment and workers. Documents provided by G�kvardar show what he potrayed as a snapshot of a larger pattern of deception: A report Newmont submitted to regulators for July 15, 2002, shows cyanide levels for water leaving the detoxification plant and pouring into the mine's tailings dam well within the safety range set by Turkish regulations. But an internal lab analysis performed for Newmont on that date shows levels 28 times higher than what the company reported - and nine times the government limit. Newmont said those results, though accurate, are taken out of context. The spike in cyanide was the result of a malfunction during the change of a process circuit, Newmont's Booth said via e-mail, after which the toxin returned to safe levels. The government launched an investigation into the spill after G�kvardar leaked the tests to the Turkish press, but no noncompliance notice was issued, Booth said. Booth said Newmont fired the employee who gave the test results to G�kvardar for "failing to maintain Company values." Yalman, the mine's doctor, said she also believed the company hid serious problems from government authorities. When mining machinery pierced a worker's foot in April, 2003, Yalman said the man was ordered to report to the mine daily and was recorded as working while he sat in the infirmary, unable to walk. When a cave-in trapped two employees at the mine in January 2002, the incident wasn't reported to regulators as required, and one of the miners was treated by an outside doctor, Yalman said. Yalman wrote a memo to mine managers in protest. Newmont curtailed her authority two months later, Yalman said. She later resigned. Booth, the Ovacik manager, denies Yalman's assertions, saying that she is using them in an effort to increase her severance payments from the company. Newmont, in turn, is suing G�kvardar for nearly $70,000 - more than his annual salary when he worked at the mine - and police have charged him with stealing corporate documents. Both cases are pending. "Newmont says 'we never do these things, we never hide anything.' But I saw it. They never told the truth to the government," G�kvardar said. Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-820-1614 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Staff writer Greg Griffin can be reached at 303-820-1241 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Staff researcher Monnie Nilsson contributed to this report. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Jazz up your holiday email with celebrity designs. Learn more. http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $4.98 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/Q7_YsB/neXJAA/yQLSAA/BRUplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. Menuju Indonesia yg Lebih Baik, in Commonality & Shared Destiny. www.ppi-india.uni.cc *************************************************************************** __________________________________________________________________________ Mohon Perhatian: 1. Harap tdk. memposting/reply yg menyinggung SARA (kecuali sbg otokritik) 2. Pesan yg akan direply harap dihapus, kecuali yg akan dikomentari. 3. Lihat arsip sebelumnya, www.ppi-india.da.ru; 4. Posting: [email protected] 5. Satu email perhari: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6. No-email/web only: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 7. kembali menerima email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
