Hope springs eternal even under the mine tailings. Levi Lalim, 55, fisherman and leader of his Paracale town’s Samahan ng mga Mangingilaw, is doing his best to save about 40 hectares of coral reef and mangrove forest submerged under red contaminated mud spewed out by mining facilities owned by three Chinese mining firms in Sitio (settlement) Pulangdaga in Barangay (village) Bagumbayan.
The engineer who helped build the damaged waste storage facility of gold producer Philex Mining Corp. in Benguet said it was wrongly constructed along a drain area of the Agno River.
Outrage from varied groups continues to snowball over the government’s issuance of an environmental compliance certificate (ECC) to mining giant Xstrata’s Sagittarius Mines Inc.
President Benigno Aquino III said on Thursday, the operations of the Semirara Mining Company (SMC) would remain suspended until an assurance from the mining firm of the safety of its site.
South Cotabato Gov. Arthur Pingoy Jr. on Wednesday downplayed the issuance of an environmental compliance certificate (ECC) to mining giant Xstrata’s Sagittarius Mines Inc. (SMI), saying the provincial government ban on open-pit mining stays.
The miners were having coffee near the end of their break around midnight on Wednesday when they noticed that earth was coming loose on the western wall of the coal mine pit.
Suspected New People’s Army rebels burned down heavy equipment owned by a quarry company in Rodriguez, Rizal, on Sunday afternoon, the regional spokesman of the military’s Southern Luzon Command, said on Monday.
All their lives, they were small-scale miners until last year, when they were turned into forest guards of the Mt. Magdiwata watershed in San Francisco, Agusan del Sur.
Environment and natural resources officials attributed on Thursday the high number of casualties in several Compostela Valley towns to unheeded government warnings on typhoon Pablo, emphasizing that illegal logging and illegal mining were to blame for the devastation.
Authorities have recovered the bodies of all three small-scale miners trapped inside two 20-meter-deep pits that were swamped by seawater last week in Barangay (village) Palanas in Paracale town in Camarines Norte.
Mining firms operating in the Cordillera have begun reviewing their waste-management facilities, including the designs of their tailings dams, in the aftermath of the tailings pond leak at the Benguet facility of Philex Mining Corp. in August.
These were allegedly the words of one of the soldiers accused of killing the wife and two sons of B’laan leader Dagil Capion, as overheard by relatives, last Thursday, when they rushed to Capion’s home and found his two surviving children, Becky (not Vicky as earlier reported), 5, and Riza, 10, inside the hut, where their mother’s and brothers’ body sprawled.
The sister of a tribal leader whose wife and two children were killed in a military operation last Thursday, said a “pangayaw” (tribal war) could erupt due to the killings.
