Gold Rush Poses Mercury Threat in Philippine Town

Antonio Torino had no idea that he was signing his baby’s death warrant two years ago when a friend persuaded him to open an illegal gold refinery in his basement.

By the time the poison gases filled his son’s tiny lungs two weeks ago, choking him and sending him into wild convulsions, Torino knew well that for months he had been balancing death with profit in his crumbling, clapboard house. And last Wednesday morning, as he sang “Amen” and helped to lower his son’s three-foot-long wooden coffin into its grave, Torino could not seem to keep the handkerchief away from his eyes.

‘What Shall We Do?’

“It was the money, you know, it was good money,” he had said before the funeral. “Maybe we people in Tagum are too ignorant to handle this. But by this time, what shall we do? My baby is already lying dead.”

Health and mining authorities in this frontier boom town are hoping that some good does come from 3-year-old Aquim Torino’s death. They hope that the boy’s painful last gasps will serve as a warning against what experts fear may easily become the Philippines’ worst environmental nightmare before the end of the decade.

Aquim Torino’s death May 22 was from acute mercury poisoning, the first in what health authorities say could be a toll of hundreds, or even thousands, in the next few years unless the government takes drastic action now.

The seeds of Tagum’s environmental disaster were sown more than three years ago, when this remote town near the southern coast of the southernmost large island of Mindanao became the hub of Asia’s biggest gold rush.

Mecca of Opportunity

Prospectors had discovered a gold vein in Tagum’s province of Davao del Norte rivaling that of the richest regions of South Africa, a mother lode so rich that tens of thousands of peasants-turned-prospectors flocked here from throughout the nation. In the last 16 months alone, those once impoverished farmers have cashed in more than $281 million worth of gold. Tagum was transformed from a rural basket case into a Mecca of opportunity.

But the boom that saved Tagum from hunger and crushing poverty may now spell its doom.

The gold rush spawned hundreds of unlicensed, small-time refineries such as Torino’s, most of them in the heart of the town. All of them use liquid mercury as part of a crude method for drawing the gold from the ore.

The ore is first mixed with water in a giant tumbling machine, called a ball mill. The tumbling action pulverizes the ore. The refiner then places some of the ore-and-water mixture in a shallow wooden pan and adds the liquid mercury. As the refiner kneads and massages the mixture, the mercury and gold form into a malleable lump.

Mercury Dumped Into Canals

To separate the gold from the mercury, the amalgam is burned with crude blowtorches, vaporizing most of the mercury into the air. The liquid waste in the pan, which includes leftover mercury, is dumped into the canals leading to the rivers that provide the island’s drinking water and food for the fish that the island’s residents eat.

All told, more than 21 tons of pure mercury have been dumped into Tagum’s rivers and air just since the beginning of last year, according to the estimate of Jose Madrona, district officer of the government’s Bureau of Mines. Madrona has been warning about the mercury problem in Tagum for nearly two years.

Calling Tagum’s massive mercury pollution, “the creeping threat to the lives of so many innocent people,” Madrona recommended last week that the government ban the use of mercury outright and confine all refining to large firms that use more advanced and safer techniques.

“At this stage, it is imperative for the government to exercise its political will . . . to strike clean the scourge that mercury brings to our people,” Madrona said.

Until Aquim Torino’s death, however, the government of President Corazon Aquino had done little or nothing even to determine the extent of pollution in Tagum.

Profit and Danger

“There was sort of a blind ignorance to all of it,” said one government health department official in Mindanao who asked not to be identified. “The gold rush was bringing millions of pesos of profit to people who would otherwise be unemployed. And no one was screaming about it in Tagum.

“The government had to weigh that against something no one could see, smell, hear or taste. No one ever thought it could be that bad.”

Preliminary samplings done by the Philippine National Pollution Control Commission and the Department of Health in the last few weeks indicate that the situation is indeed bad and is likely to get much worse.

Two random samples taken last year by pollution engineers from the canal leading from Tagum’s largest gold refinery to one of Mindanao’s principal rivers have shown that mercury levels were 60,000 times higher than the government’s safety standard of 0.02 parts per million.

Although mercury levels in the river itself were far lower, scientists said they took only surface samples and that contamination of the riverbeds, where fish find the bacterial organisms that they feed on, is far more severe.

Food Not Yet Implicated

“There apparently are no cases yet that would implicate the food chain,” said Dr. Cora Rivera, a neurologist who was on the government health department team that surveyed Tagum and its surrounding towns.

But Rivera added that during her brief visit she found at least three miners who showed definite symptoms of mercury poisoning: tremors, personality changes, vomiting, diarrhea and weakness in their joints.

“I just don’t think we have enough medical resources to make a decent study,” the doctor said.

Teresa Soriano could not agree more. She is an engineer in the Davao office of the National Pollution Control Commission, where five inspectors are responsible for a six-province region that includes not only Tagum but heavy-industrial zones as well.

Soriano said her commission has not even been able to survey mercury pollution levels in Tagum’s air and water for nearly a year, not since the office’s mercury analyzer broke down. The commission has two other analyzers in the country, but those are broken, too, she said.

“We ordered spare parts last July, but they still haven’t come,” she added. “They come from Japan, and I think there’s some problem with importation laws.

“We cannot recommend shutting down any of these operations until we have a scientific or statistical basis to do so, and we cannot get that basis unless we have the equipment.”

Mayor Starts Inquiry

Tagum Mayor Antonio Lagunzad said he is no longer waiting for government pollution readings. In the wake of the Torino boy’s death, the mayor said, he set up a task force that began tracking down and inspecting all the city’s hundreds of small gold refineries. If they failed to put in a chimney filtration device and a waste-water retention pond recommended by pollution engineers before May 15, Lagunzad vowed that he would shut them down.

Last week, more than seven days after his deadline expired, Lagunzad said in an interview that fewer than 20 of the 70 operations inspected had installed the devices. Some installed them and then removed them because they slow production and thus cut into their profits.

“I’m going to start shutting them down next week,” the mayor vowed. But, slowly, he added. “I, too, have to think of my people’s livelihood. This will cut deepest into the lowest bracket of society here.”

Ultimately, Lagunzad wants to consolidate all the tiny refineries into a large, cooperative complex on 75 acres of government land that he has set aside just outside of town. The facility will not be completed until the end of this year, but Lagunzad said refinery owners have agreed to comply with pollution requirements in the meantime and pledged to move when the time comes.

The agreement was struck at a meeting that Lagunzad held with all the refinery owners in late April.

Antonio Torino was there, a fact that Lagunzad remarked on in his interview, adding, “Forgive me, but when I heard that the Torino child had died, I said, ‘Well, it serves Mr. Torino right.’ ”

Were Told of Dangers

During that meeting, the mayor said angrily, Torino and the others were bluntly told the dangers of “cooking” the mercury-gold amalgam over blowtorches; of handling raw liquid mercury in the tailing ponds where the gold is separated from the ore, and of dumping mercury waste into the town’s drainage canals.

Torino conceded that he was there and said that he stood up and took a stand.

“I said it is better to stop operation now so that there will be no damage in the long range,” Torino recalled during an interview last week.

But three weeks later, on May 10, a prospector showed up at Torino’s front door with a sack of ore so rich that it ultimately yielded more than four pounds of pure gold--$31,500 worth, of which Torino would get a handsome percentage for his work.

Torino’s workers began just after dawn that day, a Sunday, and worked well past noon. By the time they finished, the enclosed one-room refinery was filled with brown smoke, and they were vomiting violently in the back alley.

Upstairs, where the fumes leaked through the wide cracks in the floor, Torino’s youngest son lay wheezing, coughing and vomiting. Quickly, the group was rushed to the hospital, where everyone recovered, except Aquim.

Two Weeks for Death

It took two weeks for the 3-year-old to die, according to his physician, Dr. Honario de la Cruz, who said he will not say definitely that Aquim died of mercury poisoning alone until his blood tests return from Manila.

“But we were giving what is usually a very effective regimen of antibiotics, and this child never responded to it,” the doctor said. “It was a rapid downhill course. . . . And there is enough ground for support that mercury definitely had something to do with the death of the child.”

Conceding that Aquim’s death was the result of a careless and isolated incident, health authorities nonetheless remain deeply worried about the future.

“There is definitely cause for alarm, but not yet for panic,” said Rivera, who has extensively studied the infamous mercury poisoning at Minamata Bay in Japan. In that area, as many as 700 died and perhaps 9,000 were crippled between the 1950s and the 1970s from consuming industrial mercury that had polluted the fish and water shortly after World War II.

Fears for Future

“What I am most afraid of, though, is (that) the problem may not be that critical now, but it will definitely develop into critical levels five years from now unless something radical is done,” Rivera said

Antonio Torino said he agrees. He demolished his tiny basement refinery last week. Few of his neighbors, though, are following suit. And there were few signs during his son’s funeral procession that the death would change much in a town that still has gold running so thickly in its veins.

As the Torino family made the 10-minute march to the church behind an ancient and battered station wagon carrying Aquim’s coffin just after dawn, no one even looked out from the dozen or so illegal refineries and goldsmith shops that, even at that hour, were churning and heating pound after pound of ore into pure gold and dumping gallon after gallon of mercury-laced waste water and smoke into the heart of Tagum.