Emma Sargsyan, YSU, Journalism department, MA student, Panorama.am
The environmental and health problems are becoming more widespread in Ararat city while the price of gold is getting higher and higher. Thought the environmental and health specialists try to prove that those problems are closely connected with more global things, people in Ararat are concerned with the damages and accidents caused by the industry.
In the last decades modern technologies have improved and gold processing is being carried out with minimal risks. There are not modern technologies in “Ararat Gold Recovery Company” (AGRC).
Industrial Ararat City has been founded in 1931 42km far from Yerevan. Yet in Soviet Times gold processing and cement companies were built in Ararat. The city has accumulated industrial, water supply, waste and greet areas decrease problems.
The tailing dam of AGRC where the liquid mass is accumulated after gold is processed is consisted of dangerous materials for not only human health but for the city’s fauna and flora.
“The tailing dam is full of materials which cause serious health diseases: breathing organs, blood and hereditary diseases like monster birth,” said Hakob Sanasaryan, the head of “Greens Union of Armenia”. There are cyanide, cadmium, copper and arsenate in the tailing dam.
In 13 November 2007 a poll was conducted through the people of Ararat to find out what percent of people are aware of the dangers and diseases caused by the tailing dam and what measures they do take to meet the ecological disease. 50 people take part in the poll and 100% of them is aware of the ecological disease caused by the tailing dam of the gold processing factory situated in their city. People are quite conscious that chemicals in the tailing dam are the enemies to their health. To the question what chemicals there are in the dam, they answered – cyanide.
But people living in Ararat are not aware of worse chemicals which caused a monster birth in industrial city Lori. “People, today, talk about some other dangers, except getting concerned by the worst ones, for example if lead and molybdenum are in their minimal amounts they are useful for nature but much of them kills the fertility by 92%,” said H. Sanasaryan.
The doctors of the only hospital in the city refused to name them but they affirmed that there are dangerous chemicals in the tailing dam. According to the official data provided by them the number of oncological diseases in the city gets higher every year: in 2004 there were 211 cases and in 2007 290 oncological cases. They said that in the last four years not a single expertise was held either by the company owners or by the government. The doctors added that these are only registers cases.
The health diseases of Ararat city can be seen even if you are not an expert, say the experts. “The cement factory is a real environmental crime together with the rest. It dismisses particles into the atmosphere which can have serious health effect on people,” said Philip Peck, international expert, Australia.
If the chemical disease of the tailing dam is invisible and people need to be informed, the situation is quite different with the cement factory, as the black particles of cement coming out from the pipe are spread on the city.
“If I could I would take my wife and my family and would leave Ararat. It is impossible to fight against so many health problems,- said 47-year-old Ashot Carukyan who lives in Ararat city,- I am thinking that my daughters are living in a toxic atmosphere, but I can not change my living place.
Whereas they both are the sequences of the problem. The real doctor cures the problem and not its results.
May 02, 2008