Steeling for David and Goliath fight
Residents show their mettle in toxic battle
OHANN Dewing had no choice. He had to leave. Too ill to work, he packed his sickly children into the family car and abandoned his polluted farm, and everything on it.
“You couldn’t live here because of the smell,” he remembers. “Your eyes start burning, your skin starts crawling and your eyes start jumping everywhere. We were all like total zombies.”
But it was the deadly, poisoned water that ultimately pushed them out eight years ago. “All my neighbours started to become ill with cancer and kidney problems. Then, I got kidney stones. You would wake up at 7am and be exhausted. You think you’re just getting old, you never imagine it’s the water.
“My children were always the smallest in their class. The women here had stillborn babies. My neighbours had pigs that were born with both sex organs.
“Cats were born without heads. If something gave birth here, there was a deformity. If you bathed in that water, you would get sores on your skin and ulcers.”
But last year, Dewing returned to his barren smallholding in Steel Valley, in the looming shadow of ArcelorMittal SA’s massive steel plant in Vanderbijlpark.
“They’ve rectified a lot of the problems,” he reveals, nodding favourably to the mountainous slagheap across the road that is being rehabilitated, “but there’s still a bad smell emanating from their operations, almost daily. But it’s like day and night from what it was.”
Dewing, who made his living as a
Jfitter-and-turner, is determined to rebuild here in Steel Valley’s dead zone. He has to – there is nowhere else to go. A proud man who laughs easily, Dewing is stitching together his ramshackle plot with whatever scrap he can find.
“I’ve bought some animals and I’m rectifying this place,” he smiles, gazing out at the once-fertile valley that has become a wasteland.
“Because the Lord is good to me, I’ve got a beautiful cow. She’s been here only two months and she gave birth and the baby is healthy.”
He has been a thorn in ArcelorMittal’s side for years. In 2002, he joined 15 others in suing the then state-owned Iscor over water pollution. He and his neighbours revealed how water from 10 of the company’s unlined ponds had seeped into their groundwater, polluting their wells, and turning them into poisoned lakes.
They documented how their crops died, their animals perished, and they fell ill. No one wanted to buy their blighted land. “Iscor offered me R50 000 for my smallholding. I couldn’t buy a Datsun 1400 bakkie with that money,” he says,
If something gave birth here, there was a deformity. If you
bathed in the water, you would get sores and ulcers.
still seething.
That pollution plume was “so bad that 35km away, there is still pollution and it’s still travelling”.
For the handful of farmers who remain in Steel Valley, ArcelorMittal still supplies them with town water. “When I came back I started irrigating,” he says.
“They were giving me such a hard time, and threatened me with legal action and to cut off my supply.
“They never gave me a letter that I can use my borehole and they never cut off my supply.
“What does that tell you? Our water is still poisoned.”
Steel Valley was a once-vibrant collection of thriving smallholdings, home to 600 plots – and it even boasted its own clinic and petrol station. But today, only four landowners remain.
Next door to Dewing’s plot, an eerie silence settles over Strike Matsepe’s property. In the early 1990s, Matsepe, a former mechanic, cashed in his pension and brought land “at the time of Mandela when people could buy wherever they liked”.
He was proud of his land, until his groundwater, too became contaminated. Later, he would be hospitalised with kidney failure, and his sister, who lived with him, would die from cancer and kidney failure.
Matsepe had mobilised his neighbours to mount court challenges, but these bids failed, resulting in out-ofcourt settlements that divided the community.
Now sickly, and in his 80s, he no longer speaks about Steel Valley, says his daughter Selloane Matsepe, who now lives on the property. By the defeated look on her face, you can tell there is only ruin here now.
After years of toil, nothing grows on the vegetable farm. “I just want to leave this place,” she says, shrugging disconsolately. “It’s not safe. I will give it away for free. There is nothing I can do about the pollution anyway.”
This week, a court battle was being fought over a document environmentalists believe is crucial to the history of Steel Valley’s pollution. On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein heard why ArcelorMittal thinks it should not have to release records regarding the environmental impact reports of its operations at Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging to the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (Veja).
For several years, the environmental lobby group has been fighting to obtain ArcelorMittal’s environmental Master Plan of 2002, which it believes reveals the effects of a pollution plume from one of its most damaging waste storage dams. It says the mysterious document, which is reportedly 8 000 pages, details pollution incidents from the 1980s until the early 2000s.
In early 2012, Veja, which is represented by the non-profit Centre for Environmental Rights, also requested records relating to the closure and rehabilitation of the company’s Vaal disposal site, in Vereeniging, after it had illegally dumped hazardous waste there.
Last year, the South Gauteng High Court ruled in their favour, ordering the steelmaker to hand over records of its master plan and disposal site to Veja. It had already made two requests under the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
But ArcelorMittal, in its appeal documents, maintains the master plan is outdated, inaccurate and irrelevant. “It does not inform the current environmental management practices of the Vanderbijlpark plant,” it says.
Similarly, the Vaal disposal site is no longer in operation “and there is accordingly no connection between its records and the exercise or protection of the rights claimed by Veja”.
Dr Victor Munnik, a political ecologist at Wits University, has no doubts. “It has never been made public. The reason? The master plan described in detail what pollution had emanated from the factory, which in its court battles the steel giant denied had ever taken place,” he says.
For Veja’s co-ordinator Samson Mokoena, the court case hinges on whether a civil society outfit can compel private firms to hand over documents illustrating their environmental impacts. He believes the plan is an “incriminating document” for the Luxembourg-based steel firm.
Theirs is a David and Goliath battle – with Veja, a tiny NGO that represents pollution-besieged Vaal, taking on the corporate might of the biggest steel giant on the continent.
“This case sends a strong message that civil society communities are watching gover nment and industry,” warns Mokoena. “If you try to hide things, they won’t go away, they’ll come and haunt you… I’m very positive the Supreme Court judges won’t move far from the judgment of the High Court.”
Ultimately, a class-action lawsuit against the company will be lodged in European courts, vows Mokoena, who also grew up in Steel Valley, but whose family was forced to sell their withering farm.
Over the years, several government agencies, including the Department of Environmental Affairs, have listed Iscor/ArcelorMittal’s environmental contraventions. The Centre for Environmental Rights believes the constitution clearly gives communities the right to monitor the environment.
“The High Court judgment confirmed the right of fence-line communities to have access to environmental documents of corporate polluters so they can be in a stronger position to protect their constitutional rights to a safe and healthy environment.”
ArcelorMittal maintains that work is being done to better its environmental performance, noting improvements in its water and effluent management.
“We are working on improving dust and sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions,” it says, adding its particulate emissions have decreased, although the latter have climbed in the past year.
From 2010 to last year, it spent more than R850 million on measures to curb environmental pollution including remediating old slagheaps. The company, too, is committed to improving community engagement, driving local economies and striving towards better social services.
But Mokoena believes too little is being done to limit the risks. “As much as they have invested, they have not done enough. Their new water treatment plant fails now and then. The dust issues are massive and people get sick.”
Dewing worries that ArcelorMittal will escape censure – again. “Samson, I hope you catch them,” he tells the activist. “We need to do anything to hold them accountable. They’ve denied liability all the way, they’ve bought off people before they could admit guilt.
“They took a lot from me. They took my children’s health, my health and, with that, all the opportunities for making money.”
He could not run his kerbing factory because there was so much oil in his water.
“Cement and oil don’t mix. I eventually had to sell that factory for scrap. I tried to farm with animals but they died.”
Dewing becomes angry as he looks at the dark smoke billowing from the steelworks.
“They are criminals,” he spits. “I lost a lot of my friends who died here because of all this pollution.
“Their steel is tainted with blood,” he says.