EDITORIAL - Are Jamaica's red mud lakes safe?

Not perhaps since the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine nearly a quarter-century ago have Europeans paid so much attention to, or been uneasy about, an environmental catastrophe in their region.

Indeed, beyond Hungary, people in Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine, and Romania, through which the River Danube passes and forms part of their borders, feel decidedly vulnerable.

The cause: one day last week, the wall of a pond that stores bauxite tailings, or red mud, from an alumina refinery at Ajkar, west Hungary, collapsed. An estimated 184 million gallons of the sludge escaped, flooding nearby villages. By weekend, there were seven reported deaths and 120 persons injured.

Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, described the event as an "unprecedented ecological disaster". He does not believe that one town, Kolantar, can be lived in again.

The danger for Hungary's downstream neighbours comes from the fact that the sludge has made its way into the Danube via tributaries and connected streams. And red mud contains iron oxide, aluminium oxide, silicon dioxide, calcium oxide (quick lime), titanium dioxide, and sodium oxide. All of these are hazardous to health. Already in Hungary, there have been large fish killed in rivers and streams into which the sludge has drained.

This development has direct and immediate relevance to this country. Jamaica is one of the world's primary producers of bauxite, the material that is refined into alumina, of which we are also a significant manufacturer. Toxic red mud is the detritus of this process.

Effluent from lakes and ponds

Jamaica has a number of red mud 'lakes' whose waste contains the same properties as the one in Hungary. There is, for instance, the old Mount Rosser containment pond that used to serve the Ewarton works when it was owned by Alcan. At Battersea, central Manchester, the pond there used to take effluent from the now mothballed Kirkvine alumina refinery. This refinery, like the one at Ewarton, is now owned by AC Rusal.

At Warminster, St Elizabeth, the pond there received effluent from Rusal's Alpart refinery, which is mothballed because of the global recession. There are also ponds near to Hayes, Clarendon, the location of the Jamalco refinery.

It is estimated that in the half-century or more of alumina production in Jamaica, more than 60 billion gallons of this sludge has built up in containment ponds. And, like the one at Ajkar, Hungary, the Jamaican red mud lakes are near to communities, as are the country's bauxite mines and alumina refineries.

The bauxite/alumina industry, despite the current challenges because of the global recession, is important to the Jamaican economy, providing skilled and relatively high-paying jobs, and a substantial portion of the country's foreign-exchange inflows. The bottom line is that the industry and community have to co-exist. Tension between plants and communities has, up to now, been largely over dust. As Hungary has shown, things can grow worse.

The firms have ecological obligations which the industry's regulators and national environmental monitors must ensure they adhere to.

In that regard, the National Environment Planning Agency and the Jamaica Bauxite Institute must pronounce on the structural integrity of our red mud lakes and assure us that even though the walls of the lakes may not have been breached, there is no leeching into groundwater systems. And they must provide the basis for their assessment.

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