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mining monstrosities in the entire planet, owned by a U.S. American who is known here, not only for other hideous pollution damage he has inflicted in the world and in the US, but for also having the largest personal residence in the country. Poisoned city fights to save its children
Families in a Peruvian valley choked by toxic gas from a smelter are taking on a US metals giant
Hugh O'Shaughnessy in La Oroya, Peru
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer
http://image.guardian.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2007/08/11/peru10b.jpg
Children wearing masks play near the towering chimneys of Peru's La Oroya refinery and metals processing plant. Photograph: Reuters
At an altitude of 13,000ft the Andean air is clear. A plume of white smoke rises from the chimney at the La Oroya smelter, hard at work refining arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium and copper. But today the company is not discharging any gases over this city in central Peru. 'It's a nice day, so the company won't be letting off any gases,' says Hugo Villa, a neurologist at the local hospital. 'They keep the worst emissions to overcast days or after dark.'
When the gases are released, they make this one of the most polluted places on the planet, with La Oroya ranking alongside Chernobyl for environmental devastation, according to a US think-tank, the Blacksmith Institute.
The company is a US corporation, Renco Doe Run. The gases are the product from the main smelter a mile or two down the valley. The high mountains around keep out the cleansing winds, meaning that airborne metals are concentrated in the valley. Neither humans nor nature can escape the company's outpourings of poisons. And, despite evidence that gases have been behind the premature deaths of workers and residents young and old, the business-oriented, pro-US government of President Alan Garcia is too afraid of foreign investors to do anything about it. More: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147039,00.html~~~~~Information on the American owner of the plant, Ira Rennert
Rennert's company, the Renco Group, is essentially a holding group that owns other companies, such as WCI Steel,
Doe Run, and used to own AM General, manufacturer of the legendary Hummer. Ira Rennert, bought AM General for $133 million in 1992. Ronald Perelman, a Wall Street corporate raider, bought a 70 percent interest in AM General of South Bend, Indiana. The deal reportedly cost close to US$1,000,000,000. The company makes the military Humvee, as well as the Hummer H1 and H2 sold by General Motors. The Renco Group has been criticized for their record on pollution and worker safety.
~snip~
In 2001, the Justice Department and EPA took action against Renco, filing suit against the company. The agencies demanded nearly $1 billion in fines, alleging MagCorp (a Renco Metals Inc. subsidiary) dumped toxic waste in ditches and ponds on the Great Salt Lake, Utah.<8> The suit claimed PCB-laced sludge and dust choked the plant's plumbing, wastewater ponds, landfill and ditches, where contaminants were 12 times the allowed limit for accidental release.<8> MagCorp maintained it was exempt from the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which requires companies to monitor certain kinds of hazardous waste.<8>
~snip~
Peru
Doe Run, Peru, (a Renco Group holding) operates a smelting plant in La Oroya, Peru, where many of the same environmental violations that were present in Herculaneum, Missouri, are being visited on La Oroya's 12,000 children.<11> The Blacksmith Institute has placed La Oroya on its list of ten most polluted places in the world, along with Chernobyl, Ukraine.<12>
~snip~
Meanwhile, thousands of children in La Oroya are suffering the effects of lead poisoning as hundreds of tons of toxins continue to spew from the smelting plant. A recent study by St. Louis University scientists found that 97 percent of children in La Oroya suffer from mental and physical deficiencies related to their exposure to polluted air.<12> More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Rennert ~~~~~How can Marco become a great doctor if he has lead poisoning?
Marco <1> dreams of becoming a doctor someday. The only problem is that 99.9% of the children tested in his hometown of La Oroya, Peru have excessive lead levels, according to a recent Government study <2> and Marco has 5 times the maximum permissible level. Lead poisoning can cause learning problems, retarded growth, hyperactivity, kidney and liver disease, and neurological problems that are the stuff of nightmares for parents everywhere <3>. In La Oroya, the lead levels are so high that many children are born with lead poisoning, which is transmitted from mother to child through the placenta during pregnancy.
Marco’s hometown is the site of a large metal smelter owned by the Doe Run Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Each day, the smelter puts out more than 1000 tons of toxic emissions over the city. When Doe Run purchased the smelter in 1997, it promised to clean things up by January 2007, and the Peruvian Government approved the sale based on the Company’s promise. But now the Company has announced that it will not keep its promise and is threatening to close down the smelter if the Government does not provide it with a 5 year extension-- despite extremely favorable mineral prices <4>. More: http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/press821.htm ~~~~~blockquote]PERU: Pollution Emergency Plan Instead of Real Action for La Oroya By Milagros Salazar LIMA, Aug 10 (Tierramérica) - Far from halting the source that is poisoning the Andean city of La Oroya, which is home to the Doe Run smelting complex, the Peruvian government ordered a contingency plan for the days when air pollution is worst, as if it were dealing with a natural disaster. The Contingency Plan for States of Alert will be presented Aug. 10 by the government's national environmental council, CONAM, which approved it Jul. 18 to protect the 35,000 inhabitants of La Oroya from the sulphur dioxide, lead and cadmium emissions from the Doe Run smokestacks. The plan is the result of two years of debates involving citizen groups, non-governmental organisations and the state agencies in charge of carrying it out, as well as representatives of the company, which will provide much of the financing. La Oroya, 180 kilometres east of Lima, is one of the country's 13 most polluted cities, the government said in 2001. The New York-based Blacksmith Institute in 2006 included it in a list of the 10 worst cases in the world. ~snip~ Once a state of alert is ordered, it will be recommended that the most vulnerable -- children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses -- should not be outdoors between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm local time, the worst period of the day for exposure. Doors and windows of homes, schools and hospitals should be closed, and food sold on the street should be covered. The population in general should cover mouth and nose with scarves and handkerchiefs when outside. The idea of facemasks was ruled out because "people don't want images that further dramatise the situation," said Rojas. More: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38854 http://www.glpby.org.nyud.net:8090/images/peru3.jpg http://www.nodirtygold.org.nyud.net:8090/pictures/LaOroya-smelter-and-boys.jpg
http://u.univision.com.nyud.net:8090/contentroot/uol/art/images/noticias/world/2007/01/070123_fe_polucion_5.jpgToxic clouds hang over Peruvian town
U.S. company bought mine tied to poisonings
By Rebecca Howard
http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com.nyud.net:8090/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/020409/040209_peru_lead_hmed8a.hmedium.jpg
Updated: 9:52 a.m. CT Feb 9, 2004
LA OROYA, Peru - Standing outside his adobe house overlooking the huge American-owned smelter in this small Andean town, Pablo Fabian watches children play beneath a smoke cloud containing toxic lead, sulfur dioxide, cadmium and arsenic.
His hands tremble when he talks about his own children. Two of them are lethargic and have trouble concentrating, symptoms of lead poisoning. Fabian blames the smelter and is determined to protect his newborn baby girl.
(snip)
Those findings led to a deal between Doe Run and Missouri’s government requiring the company to offer to buy 160 nearby homes. The buyout, which has yet to be completed, is one factor that may have helped drop the percentage of children with high levels of lead to 17 percent last year.
Leslie Warden, a leader in a Herculaneum activist group, visited last year to see Doe Run operations in Peru.
“They have defined a new low in my mind,” she said after her stay in La Oroya. More: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4145692 / ~~~~~La Oroya is a city in Junín Region, Peru. It is located at around 11°31′60″S, 75°54′0″W, at an altitude of about 4000 m. It was named in 2006 in a list of the 10 most polluted places on earth by the Blacksmith Institute, a US-based environmental charity <1>. Studies carried out by the Director General of Environmental Health in Peru in 1999 showed that ninety-nine percent of children living in and around La Oroya have blood lead levels that exceed acceptable amounts. The drinking water of La Oroya has been shown to contain 50 per cent more lead than the levels recommended by the World Health Organisation. These studies have also shown high levels of contamination of the air with 85 times more arsenic, 41 times more cadmium and 13 times more lead than is safe <2>.
These high levels of pollution are most likely caused by the presence of large scale refinery and smelting operations, a majority of which are owned and operated by the Doe Run Company which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the US corporation, Renco Group Inc. Doe Run is a major employer in the city and has used this powerful position to mitigate effective opposition to its poisoning of the air and water. This has involved high level lobbying with the cities ex-mayor and union leaders, who have successfully forced the Peruvian government to drop plans for pollution reduction measures <3>. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Oroya |
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