Developing world – Poisoned city fights to save its children, Peru
Posted in Uncategorized by fedwards on September 7th, 2007
Many of the articles I post on this blog are of a positive nature – they showcase people’s action to progress urban sustainability, providing hope, models and a virtual, supportive community as a base for others to do the same. The SustainableCitiesNet.com site also strives to represent cities in the developing world who can offer simple solutions often are overlooked in our economically- and development- driven Western worlds. The article below illustrates the other side of the coin, which provides an important reminder about what some city-dwellers face in their drive to live in environmentally and socially sustainable places.
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
Extract below from: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147039,00.html
“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.
Now, however, the townspeople, once muted by their worries about losing their jobs with the valley’s biggest employer, are turning their attention towards Ira Rennert, Renco’s proprietor.”
For the full article visit: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147039,00.html
