Dear Editor,
I read a disturbing letter by one Trevor Atkinson, titled “Omai also made no profit” (07.03.17). Apart from his other non-sequiturs, he charges that Dr Beharry “continues to mislead the Guyanese and international communities that with the presence of Barama in our country our forests will be plundered or are undergoing destruction or depletion”. All I can say to this is that I have also read what Dr Beharry has written and can confirm that the suggestion that he is misleading us is a myth.
Is it not true that the Barama Company has failed to meet both the Guyanese and international standards? Were it not for Mahadeo Kowlessar, Janette Bulkan, Seelochan Beharry and other writers would we have been publicly informed as to what is going on? And were it not for these writers would Barama be announcing recently in public that it is now putting itself in order?
Mr Atkinson assumes that because Dr Beharry once lectured in chemistry at the University of Guyana he is disqualified to “tell the difference between non-conformity with FSC principles and forest destruction.” By this Mr. Atkinson is attempting to disqualify all intelligent readers by virtue of their being in another profession. Mathe-maticians, medical doctors, mechanical engineers, you name it. How is it that the state allows judges and juries to make life or death decisions based sometimes on what they learn from expert witnesses in professions other than their own? I well remember Mr NO Poonai, who used to regularly write “A Naturalist’s Notebook” up to the time of his death. He had an MS in Conservation, but he was a lawyer by profession.
Omai made no profit?
To cap it all, Mr Atkinson wants Beharry to tell him why Omai Gold Mines Ltd (OGML) made no profit after 10 years. I suppose Dr Beharry is quite capable of researching the matter, but I was in a better position to know from the local point of view; and I don’t suffer from the lack of qualification, irrelevantly applied to him.
The lesser spill
There was an open forum after the first (smaller, May 1995) cyanide spill to which members of the public were invited. I discovered there that OGML said it could give neither the hour nor the amount of the spill. I was the only person who saw what was wrong with that claim. All the others, including the government officials and the press, concentrated on the environmental impact of the spilled cyanide, not the cause. OGML readily went along with this.
The danger, however, was in the complete trust the government gifted Omai, for it was allowed to monitor itself.
I learnt there that, apart from the expatriate(s) emp-loyed by OGML, I was the only qualified chemical engineer who knew details of the complex chemical processing of gold ore (I lectured on it in Advanced Inorganic Chem-istry at the University of Guyana). As a chemist I am able to determine what and how much. But as a chemical engineer I am also able to know when, and if not, then why.
If OGML did not know how much, then it had failed to apply an elementary mass balance. Simply put, what goes in must come out. In a responsibly run chemical plant, especially where lethal substances like cyanides are involved, all the inputs must balance the outputs. If there is a spill, then the remainder to make up this balance can be calculated. In many ways, except for repulsive toxicity, it is like money.
If OGML could not make up a balance it meant that it did not have the flow meters that were supposed to be in place in such a chemical factory. If it did not have the flow meters, it would have contravened basic safety regulations.
If it did have the required number of working meters, then it was at the very least, negligent.
Not only that: the rate of flow could have allowed an estimate of when it happened and how long for, depending on the nature of the spill, details of which were never released to the public.
So why did no one heed what I said? Well, not quite no one: the chemical engineer(s) on the OGML staff would most certainly have paid close attention. At that time I spoke too politely.
The government was not wanting to lose an investor that promised much, so in effect it gave OGML the franchise for holding the public forum, all expenses for which the latter would no doubt have had to pay.
OGML would also naturally have had to pay for the cleanup, the official enquiry, and the calming of the fears of the public.
This meant OGML was going to call the shots in the name of a government investigation. And guess who it was most certainly not going to call on. Saddam Hussein had the same strategy. He claimed his chemical factories were producing agricultural chemicals, not chemicals for warfare, but the UN inspectors were repeatedly not allowed to see what was going on. Unfortunately for him, the USA and the UK took the consequences of the lack of monitoring very seriously.
The big spill
Guyana is too small to attract that kind of attention. So then came the big spill. Nobody had done any monitoring between the spills, only public relations, because nobody but OGML had the money to employ monitors. I would have done it for free, but there was no hope of me overcoming such vested interests.
Nevertheless, soon after the big spill, one enlightened person, knowing my expertise, sent me the results of the measured concentrations of the cyanide as it made its way inexorably up the Essequibo River, and I produced the first charts.
These showed that the toxicity had diminished to tolerable levels by the mighty Essequibo River; but I had no means of validating the sampling methods.
I got no more data after that. Someone above must have realized the consequences of allowing a properly qualified outsider in.
Unaccountability
You may well ask if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was not set up to do the monitoring for the citizens of Guyana – but you must remember who is its overseers. After I read that astonishing claim by OGML that it was not making a profit, I enquired of the EPA specifically how much cyanide was being used by OGML over what period of time.
After not getting an answer for some time I put my questions in writing. The written answers came a month later. All were provided by OGML.
The EPA was simply passing on information. It generated none of its own on this important environmental case. So much for monitoring! OGML was in effect allowed to operate unchecked (some would say sovereignly) even after the environmental disaster.
Who can believe that OGML would invest to become the second largest gold producer in the Americas with what it called in its own brochure ‘a low grade mine’? My point is that only the top people in such an internally highly regulated enterprise would know the truth. And we cannot prove otherwise, because we allowed them to monitor themselves without any real regulation.
It has been said that everyone makes mistakes, so governments can also make mistakes.
But I draw the line at the implication of Mr Atkinson’s use of Omai’s lack of profit. One mistake does not justify another.
Please, Dr Beharry and others, continue to enlighten us. Perhaps it will motivate the politicians to properly staff and equip the Guyana Forestry Commission to do its job of monitoring the use of our heritage in the land of the free.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai