Ani Matevosyan, Armenianow.com
The hill in the background, looming above this Hrazdan city park, is the proposed location for a metal-processing plant.
The hill wrapped around the town of Hrazdan like a crescent moon is now covered with green grass and wildflowers.
But there are plans to build a metal-processing mine on the hill, close to three schools and residential houses in a settlement less than two kilometers from the town. The proposed plant has raised environmental concerns that heavy metal processing will release dust into the air that can, at worst, cause cancer and serious respiratory problems as well as clog up the air and water supply. The chemical elements can remain in the soil and human body for many years.
“The problem is that this mine is open where these heavy metals can be spread by the wind,” said Edgar Yengibaryan, coordinator of the Aarhus Environmental Information Center in Hrazdan. “Besides that, under this mine there are wells that provide drinking water for Hrazdan, Abovian, Gagarin, which can be poisoned.”
Nobody knows when exactly the Nagin Ltd. Company will build the metal processing plant, said Yengibaryan. When he directly asked this question to Ministry of Environment Minister Ara Haratyunyan in June, he said the minister would say only that “when we know the answer, we will tell you.”
Much of the planning has been done in secret. The ministry has posted a report on its website, claiming it offers an environmental impact study. Yet only the first 48 pages of the 90-page report are available, and the pages available show only the environment description and Hrazdan, but not the impact of the mine on the environment. The ministry has ignored repeated requests from a This Month reporter to provide the entire document.
Despite the Ministry of Environment’s claims of having organized public hearings in Hrazdan in February on the draft proposal, Yengibaryan contends the hearings weren’t publicized at all. They weren’t advertised on the local television station or newspaper, nor were they posted in any city building. Yengibaryan said he can find no evidence of anyone who attended the public hearing.
“The law provides that hearings are announced a few days before they begin. We opened the ministry’s site only after we learned about the hearings and saw that the information on the hearings planned for February 13 was posted on Feb. 11,” he said.
The Nagin Company has been equally difficult to track down. The address and telephone number for the Armenian company listed with the Ministry of Economy led to a private mining metallurgy institute that often performs environmental impact studies for such proposals. But no one there knew anything about Nagin. Anonymous sources say the company is owned by the former Minister of Environment, Vartan Ayvazyan, a charge he repeatedly refused to comment on.
In the meantime, researchers of the Acopian Center for the Environment at American University of Armenia say exploitation of a mine located close to the town would seriously damage the environment. The report by the center says: “Iron ores also usually contain reserves of other metals, including copper, chrome, selenium, arsenic metal and others. So, if the company starts extracting the ore, it will endanger the environment causing contamination threatening the town.”
The report also underlined a particular concern over the possible contamination of the air.
“The dust produced by any metal ore industry may cause serious respiratory diseases with the citizens, because of its toxicity. Dust particles are particularly dangerous for people suffering asthma and lung diseases,” reads the report.
Karo Tumoyan, head of the nature protection department at the agency for agriculture and nature protection of Kotayk province administration stated in an interview with This Month, that the regional administration was completely bypassed in this particular project.
“The rules have changed: the consent of the province administration was a must for exploitation of mines before, and we used to require survey results from the head of the community, where the mine site was located,” said Tumoyan. “But in recent years licenses have been granted without asking the opinion of the province administration. We now have no leverage over the process.”
The environmental problems in the town with a population of 60,000 are huge, even before the metal ore plant gets put in place.
Hrazdan resident Anush Vardanyan is an organizer at Aarhus and a graduate student whose doctoral dissertation is devoted to the influence of industrial emissions on environment and humans. She explains the major part of the population in the neighborhood of Hrazdan has been suffering respiratory problems and diseases beginning with the 1970s, when a cement plant was built there.
“If the iron ore is mined, the number of people suffering from cancer will add to those already having various diseases, because the dust of metals is more stable and once getting into the body causes transformations on the cellular level, which can cause cancer,” said Vardanyan.
Thomas Lyman, a senior researcher at the Acopian center AUA and one of the authors of the report, says he knows from his own experience what iron ore mining can do to a town.
“I am from the state of Montana in the U.S. The town of Butte, once known as ‘the richest hill in the world’ and the territory with the largest mining of copper, is contaminated today so much that it is considered as the largest and the most dangerous and toxic area currently being cleaned up in the U.S.,” Lyman said. “The rivers, the brooks, the soil and the woods in the neighborhood of Butte are polluted so much that fishing is dangerous in some areas. The territory now has to be fenced to prohibit people’s entrance there.
“I wouldn’t like to see Hrazdan in the same condition. “I am concerned with the projected mining enterprise and the potential damage it may cause to the environment and the people.”
August 18, 2009