High Andes site tests abilities, limits of mining
Barrick project to off er big benefi ts, but with many environmental challenges
Up to 10,000 people, many of them from the villages closest to the mine, will be employed during the construction phase and another 1,650 will operate the mine for at least the next 25 years.
Part 1 of 2 PASCUA- LAMA — Just breathing is difficult at this altitude, with a howling wind disturbing the utter majestic silence of the snow- capped Andes mountains, threatening to blow you over the edge.
You’d think you were alone at the top of the world.
But what happens up here in Pascua- Lama, where Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold is developing the first open- pit gold mine to straddle two countries, will have a huge impact on the people living in the valleys below on both sides of the border — for better or for worse.
After more than a decade of intense debate — often played out in front of the Canadian embassies in Santiago and Buenos Aires — the mine is set to open in 2014, and to produce 850,000 ounces of gold a year, as well as vast amounts of copper and silver.
Up to 10,000 people, many of them from the villages closest to the mine, will be employed during the construction phase and another 1,650 will operate the mine for at least the next 25 years.
Those numbers don’t include the people hired to feed and clothe those living at the summit camps as they work day and night, summer and winter, in temperatures ranging from 30 degrees Celsius to minus- 40.
To the spinoff effects, add myriad contributions the company is making in the name of corporate social responsibility — from schoolbooks and adult education programs to providing dentists and digging irrigation canals — and you can see why the Barrick logo has come to replace local government emblems on so many billboards and buses.
But critics, local and in the faraway capitals of Buenos Aires and Santiago, fear the project — located in virgin territory amid glaciers that feed several rivers below — could also wreak long- term environmental havoc if chemicals make their way into the river systems or the glaciers are damaged.
According to Barrick, the mine will use up to 38 tonnes of explosives a day to blast mountaintops into rocks, then up to 27 tonnes of cyanide and 33 million litres of water per day to extract the gold.
Some critics, like the mayor of Vallenar, Chile, who was once a miner himself, said it’s not safe for anyone to work with heavy machinery and toxic chemicals at that altitude, where winds can gust up to 300 kilometres an hour and rockfalls, electrical storms and avalanches are a danger. According to Lucio Cuenca, director of the non- governmental organization Latin American Observatory on Environmental Conflicts ( OLCA), at least 14 workers have died on the Chilean side since 1997, when exploration at the mine site began in earnest, several from accidents when their vehicles rolled over, one in a rockfall and five who froze to death. Barrick would not provide figures or details on the deaths at the mine site.
More recently, the Chilean government ordered Barrick on Oct. 31 to suspend pre- stripping at the mine — blasting off the very tops of the mountain peaks that don’t contain valuable ore — out of concerns workers were breathing in too much noxious dust. Work has not yet resumed.
In the longer term, opponents worry about what will happen to the villages, deep in South American wine country, if the glaciers melt or the rivers they feed are contaminated or simply run dry.
There is a lot at stake: Barrick, the largest gold producer in the world, with the most mines and the most reserves, has already spent $ 3.7 billion to develop the mine, including millions for a sustained publicrelations campaign to convince locals the mine will be beneficial to their communities — not just to shareholders.
We are expected just to trust Barrick Gold.
The livelihood of so many people is on the line.
LUCIO CUENCA DIRECTOR, LATIN AMERICAN OBSERVATORY ON ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICTS
Barrick’s CEO, Jamie Sokalsky, has made Pascua- Lama the company’s priority, even as its cost forecasts have almost tripled during the last three years. In 2009, the project was expected to cost $ 3 billion. Now it’s estimated at $ 8.5 billion, news that on Nov. 1 made the Toronto- based company’s stock plummet by eight per cent.
Meanwhile, the governments of Chile and Argentina, like others throughout Latin America, have facilitated foreign — mostly Canadian — investment in “mega- mining” projects like Pascua- Lama in the hopes they will pull depressed regions out of economic stagnation by providing jobs and royalties.
Barrick will pay three per cent of its profits, estimated at $ 1.4 billion per year, in royalties — after deductions — split between the two countries if and when the mine finally opens.
It is not so easy to put a number on the cost to farmers and wine producers, already living in the most arid region on Earth, if their worst fears come true and their entire way of life evaporates along with the glaciers above.
They can live without gold, they said. But they can’t live without water.
For them, the rush for gold and silver at Pascua- Lama is symptomatic of a second, gentler, conquest of the Americas — this time, led by the Canadians.
Chile: Oasis in the desert
José Olivares, a baseball cap shading his weathered face, surveys his small parcel of land in the foothills of the Andes, in the municipality of Alto del Carmen, Chile, about 45 km from — and 4,500 metres below — the mine along a switchback road.
Surrounded by green olive and grape vines, mango and avocado trees, it’s hard to believe this town in the Huasco Valley is part of the Atacama Desert — “the most arid place on Earth!” Olivares proclaims with pride.
Drier than the Sahara Desert, it has rained only once here in the last 10 years, he said. And that was five years ago.
Yet the Huasco Valley, a 700km, 12- hour drive north from Santiago, is the last fertile region in the north of the country, thanks largely to the glaciers above.
Even without rain, the rivers born in the Andes cordillera are replenished by snow and glacier melt, bringing water for irrigation and other uses to about 70,000 people in the valley so they can harvest three crops a year — starting with grapes destined for the U. S. and Canada.
Over hundreds of years, the glaciers have provided cyclical relief to the parched land — the less it rains, the more water is released from the glaciers, to be used for irrigation, much like withdrawing savings from a bank during lean years.
The prolonged drought has taken its toll, however.
For the last three summers, part of the Huasco River, including a 10- km stretch where generations of local children have gone swimming, has slowed to a trickle. Some blame Barrick, though operations at the mine have not yet begun; others point to climate change as the likely culprit.
But few doubt that the mine will mean more competition for increasingly scarce water resources, and that its operations could exacerbate the situation.
Water- usage deals
According to the terms of the special protocol signed by Argentina, Chile and Barrick Gold in 2004, the company will be entitled to take 42 litres of water per second from the Chilean side, and 350 litres a second from the Argentine side. That’s almost 34 million litres of water a day.
( Right now, Barrick is only using water for the camp facilities, workers and to control the amount of dust in the air.)
Rodolpho Westhoff, Barrick’s environmental manager at the mine site, said the company only intends to use one per cent of the Huasco River’s flow, and 55 per cent of the flow of the Taguas River in Argentina.
Westhoff’s 50 on- site staff members are monitoring everything, he explained, from the movement of native guanacos ( wild llamas) and burrowing parrots across the mine’s 438- square- kilometre territory, to the quality of water at 73 locations — 48 in Chile, 25 in Argentina.
Barrick, in an effort to convince its opponents that the company is committed to environmental protection, has begun soliciting members of the communities below the mine to monitor water themselves. So far, they have done so four times, Westhoff said. Neither the quality nor the quantity of water has been affected, he said.
Then again, the mine is not yet in operation.
Westhoff, a jovial man who was director of a governmental environment agency in the south of Chile before joining Barrick, said his team is closely monitoring the glaciers in particular, which account for up to 70 per cent of the flow of rivers born in the cordillera.
They painstakingly measure the thickness of the snow and ice, and download satellite photos of them three times a day.
“Every day ( the measurements) go up and down,” Westhoff said, overlooking Estrecho and Los Amarillos, two glaciers adjacent to the mine pit on either side of the Chile- Argentina border. “Climate warming is a reality. Glaciers in Patagonia and glaciers in Canada are shrinking. We are not immune to that.”
But there is evidence that Barrick’s exploration activities are directly responsible for the shrinkage of three smaller glaciers within the Pascua- Lama territory.
According to a 2009 report by the Dirección General de Aguas — a Chilean government agency charged with monitoring and managing water resources — Toro 1, Toro II and Esperanza glaciers have shrunk by 50 to 70 per cent since the company began exploring for gold in 1997.
There has been no other activity in the vicinity to explain the drastic shrinkage.
Cuenca said that during the initial exploration phase, the company drilled in and around the glaciers and even built a road through one.
Glaciers melting
The dust that was created, whipped by the fierce winds, landed on the glaciers and turned them a darker shade of grey. The glaciers therefore absorbed more sunlight, and melted.
( According to Westhoff, whose team also measures dust accumulation on the glaciers, 80 per cent of the dust on glaciers is from natural sources blown around by the wind — 20 per cent is from Barrick operations.)
In its environmental impact report submitted to the Chilean government in 2005, Barrick drew up a plan to move the three glaciers out of the way by taking blocks of ice by bulldozer and “bonding” them to another glacier four kilometres away.
Given the widespread public opposition, the plan was rejected by the government — and has been lambasted by environmentalists ever since.
In approving the mine project the following year, the Chilean government said Barrick must not touch or otherwise affect the glaciers with its operations and the two parties agreed to a series of mitigation techniques. Trucks carrying ore or mine tailings are supposed to be covered, and the roads within the mine territory are supposed to be watered regularly to limit the amount of dust in the air.
Cuenca, however, said he is not satisfied. The company has already been sanctioned for not watering the roads, taking water from an area not authorized, fecal contamination in the water, and driving through Alto del Carmen instead of using the bypass road.
Until about eight months ago, locals said, dozens of trucks barrelled through the tranquil town of Alto del Carmen every day, carrying explosives and chemicals past the school and up to the mine, despite Barrick’s promise to detour around inhabited areas. That did not help relations with the community, either. But most importantly Cuenca said, you can’t cover the entire mine pit.
“According to their own documents ( Barrick’s 2005 environmental impact assessment report), they will be using 82 tonnes of explosives per day. How will they make sure they are not harming the glaciers? How will they control the dust, and the vibrations? No one knows. We are expected just to trust Barrick Gold. But the livelihood of so many people is on the line.”