Another spill in Benguet tailings dam reported

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Gold and copper producer Philex Mining Corp. on Thursday scrambled to contain another leak at its waste facility in Itogon, Benguet.

The new leak was recorded at 2:40 a.m. on Thursday but was contained at 6 a.m. on the same day, according to Felizardo Gacad, Cordillera mining division chief of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB).

The leak was confirmed on Saturday by Philex legal officer Eduardo Aratas, who is assigned to the firm’s Padcal mine.

Repairs at the firm’s tailings dam No. 3 had been hampered by bad weather, a month after the facility detected that it had spilled sedimentation and tailings pond water during strong rains on Aug. 1.

On Aug. 2, Fay Apil, acting MGB director in the Cordillera, ordered Philex to cease operations at the Padcal mine, which straddles the Benguet towns of Itogon and Tuba, to ease pressure on the tailings pond.

Tailings dam No. 3 contained the mine’s wastes that had been expelled since the early 1990s. Two older tailings dams had been decommissioned in the span of the mine’s operations beginning in the late 1950s.

Apil said the MGB is studying the impact of the latest leak.

Philex faces a P326-million fine for discharging up to 6.5 tons of sedimentation on Aug. 1 into the Balog River, a river tributary of the Agno River which flows down to Pangasinan.

According to MGB records, the first leak had led to four recorded discharges of tailings into the environment.

Bad weather had also affected a river clean-up program being undertaken by Philex workers and volunteers from the Itogon and Tuba communities.

Apil said the MGB had urged the volunteers to postpone some of their activities while the agency determined that measures undertaken to solve the leaks and the structural integrity of the tailings dam were sound. This was meant for the safety of the clean-up groups, she said.

But on Saturday, Philex workers proceeded to San Manuel, Pangasinan, to continue the clean-up operations along the Agno River there. The river flows to the San Roque Multipurpose Dam, which straddles San Manuel and Itogon.

Philex crew members also took water samples to test if mine tailings had contaminated the water in the dam’s reservoir, Tom Valdez, vice president for corporate social responsibility of the dam’s operator, the San Roque Power Corp., said in a text message.

Reached for comment, Carlos Tayag, MGB Ilocos director, said “continuous monitoring and sampling are to be undertaken at the San Roque Dam.”

Nestor Domenden, Ilocos director of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, said he sent a team to the dam to take samples, barely a week after he concluded that the tilapia and carp grown in the dam were not contaminated by tailings released from the leak on  Aug. 1.

He said mine tailings usually contain cadmium, copper, lead and arsenic that may be ingested by fish.

“We have not been informed yet of the leak. But I’m dispatching a team immediately to the area,” he said. “Tailings go to the bottom of the body of water. We released nine kinds of bottom fishes there but we have not sampled them because the reservoir is deep.”

“But for more than two years that we have taken fish samples from the dam, there has been no change. The heavy metal content in fishes was all below tolerable limits,” Domenden said.

At 6 a.m. on Saturday, the dam’s water elevation was 278.73 meters above sea level, indicating that the dam would not release water back to the Agno River. The dam’s spilling level is 280 masl.