Breakthrough for stricken Steel Valley
The long-suppressed ArcelorMittal report confirms pollution and risks
FOR MORE than 50 years, they lived in the dark and dangerous shadow of their powerful neighbour: Iscor/ArcelorMittal’s steelworks at Vanderbijlpark. Today, only one family is left.
And even Johan Dewing questions his bittersweet decision to return his family to Steel Valley, a onceproud and vibrant collection of 600 families, after he escaped the pollution that destroyed his health, his farm – and his dreams – more than nine years ago.
“When the wind starts blowing from that direction, it can get terrible, man,” he says, his blue-eyed gaze settling on the black smoke swirling from the culprit, which towers across the road from his smallholding.
“It’s a sump smell, like tar bur ning. Your nose starts bleeding. Your sinus flares up. Your eyes tear up. You wake up with a headache here – that’s a standard. Some nights, you can’t breathe.”
Like many of his neighbours, the sickly Dewing es- caped Steel Valley after years of pollution from ArcelorMittal poisoned his borehole, and withered his crops.
He was admitted to hospital with kidney damage.
Other neighbours sold out to the steel giant.
But with little left other than his property – and armed with hope for remaking his future – Dewing returned two years ago.
“I complain to ArcelorMittal almost daily about their pollution. I’ve even written to the President’s Office. But I will say it’s much better than it was in the past. Then, you couldn’t live here any more.”
This week, the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (Veja) released ArcelorMittal’s 8 000-page environmental Master Plan to Steel Valley landowners like Dewing and to the public. The company had kept these environmental records secret for 12 years.
The master plan, says Dr Victor Munnik, a research associate at the Society, Work and Developmental Institute at Wits University, who based his PhD on the Steel Valley case, provides clear evidence of the risks of the pollution from the company’s waste – stored in its slagheaps and unlined dams – to human health, livelihoods, property and ecosystems.
“The documents said there was extensive pollution to the groundwater below and beyond the steel factory, and that this was dangerous to human health and the environment.”
Veja waged a battle of more than 10 years to obtain the plan. It comprises 22 specialist environmental reports describing the geology and soil and detailing the extent of groundwater pollution, surface water pollution, air pollution, risks to envi- ronmental harm and human health, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem effects.
Residents of Steel Valley had fought Iscor’s pollution since the 1960s. In the 1990s, water experts like Dr Carin Bosman recalls, one resident opened up a closed borehole, pumped it for a day – and struck oil. His groundwater was filled with cancer-causing dense, non-aqueous phase liquid pollution.
Bosman also recalls how part of Iscor’s steelworks was so polluted that the wasteland was called “Siberia”. Residents had to dig furrows to protect their land from it. Steel Valley homes and gardens were coated in white salt crusts.
Between 2000 and 2002 Iscor responded by producing the master plan that it kept argely under wraps, until the Supreme Court of Appeal ordered it in November to hand the plan over to Veja, a small environmental outfit, ending a protracted and precedent-setting court battle.
The court described the company as “disingenuous”, and its approach “obstructive” and “contrived”.
The steel giant had argued in court that the master plan was outdated and irrelevant and the findings flawed.
A Centre for Environmental Rights attorney, Robyn Hugo, who represented Veja, notes, however, that the company mentioned the master plan regularly in its annual reports, referring to it as its primary en- vironmental strategy.
“It was intended to be a 20-year plan,” she says.
Munnik adds: “Despite its confidential status, the master plan was used by Iscor to negotiate for water-use licences and other per missions from the regulator.
“At one stage, it was semiavailable to the public in the Vanderbijlpark library as part of public consultation for a water-use licence, but not allowed to be copied or taken out, and disappeared from public sight again… this information could not be used, for example in court cases, because it was protected by confidentiality.
“The regulator was therefore complicit in keeping the information in the master plan away from the residents who needed it to defend themselves against Iscor’s pollution.”
While experts are studying the plan, extracts show extensive pollution affected the groundwater below and beyond the steel factory. This was dangerous to human health and the environment, but would be “difficult” and “expensive” to clean, the plan says.
Samson Mokoena, Veja coordinator, worries that the company has not adequately addressed the pollution, which is continuing.
ArcelorMittal says it has spent nearly R1 billion on rehabilitation efforts, water treatment plants and dust control measures. It is committed to “open and transparent engagement” about environmental and community issues.
Hugo says other pollutionbesieged communities can rely on the court’s judgment to support their rights to obtain envi- ronmental records as a means of assessing whether polluting companies are complying with the law.
Munnik remains captivated by the case. “What happened to Steel Valley is environmental injustice. I’m still trying to decide what allows that – that says it’s okay for people to be polluted, to get cancer, to have cadmium in their kidneys… There must be a better way of making things we need… a more careful way.”
Veja plans to erect a special plaque at the Vanderbijlpark library recognising the fight against the steel giant. Copies of the master plan will also be available there.
“There must be a process where ArcelorMittal acknowledges it has done wrong. There must be compensation for residents,” insists Mokoena.
What… says it’s okay for people
to get cancer