Showing posts with label ground water will be contaminated. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ground water will be contaminated. Show all posts

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Forest of Halkidiki Greece

By Liliana Usvat
Blog 211-365

I was visiting Greece and while in Thessaloniki we were invited by a group of young people to tste the products of the area cheese tomatoes to see what they will loose because of an Canadian company wants to destroy to find and extract Gold.


It was a cry for help from people of Greece, country that i fell in love with while visiting it, to stop the destruction of the land of Halkidiki.

I felt for the cause so I decided to write about this in my Blog.

The destruction of Halkidiki has begun.
 
Since mid -June 2012 the Canradian company Eldorado Gold together with the construction company Aktor  with the blessing of the Greek State started razing the ancient forest in Skouries to turn into a huge open - pit mine.

The pharaonic project will turn Halkidiki into a wasteland and drain every single drop of water.

Poverty is not having water to drink.
Wounds of the past means total destruction in the future.

The "investment" planned by Hellas Gold ( 95% owned by Canadian company Eldorado Gold and 5% by Aktor) is a barbaric intervention in a small densely populated region with a rich natural and cultural environment.

The Scale of future plans is massive 33 millions tons were excavated in the past 2500 years with the plans is to extract 380 millions tons in the next 25 years, until the last metal is removed from the ground.

All mining activities and installations are located on an active seismic faultline which has already caused earthquakes of magnitude 7 on the Richter scale.

The upcoming disaster is of biblical proportions. In addition to the existing underground metal mining activities the plan is to develop a series of new open pit mines as well as a metallurgy complex. The processing of raw ore to produce pure metals is the most polluting industrial activity in the world.

What the independent scientific institution say?

Forest
  • The region ancient fores will incur permanent and irreversible damage, destroying the landscape and its biodiversity.

Water:  
  • Draining of mountain aquifers will cause the water table to drop by 600m causing desertification. 
  • Surface and ground water will be contaminated with sulphuric acid, heavy metals as a result of mine drainage.
  • The intensity of dangerousness of floods will increase.
  • Deep mining in Olympiada will cause salinization of underground aquifer.
Soil
  • The pollution from heavy metals carried in water will contaminate the soil, flora, fauna and crops, even at a big distance from mining activities.
Atmosphere
  • The atmosphere will be contaminated with airborne particles and heavy metals in particular arsenic. 3116tons of dust per hour will be generated by Skouries mine alone. This toxic dust will travel over large distances, in a similar way to the sand dust from Sahara Desert.
Health,

Contamination of the environment and food chain with heavy metals ( lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, copper) will cause disease such as affection of the nervous system of children, anemia, kidney failure, gastroenteritis, nephritis, liver failure, hepatitis, cirrhosis, jaundice cancer

Conclusion

And all of this so few thousands of people maximum to make a profit. Is it worth it?
And you may ask why the health of the planet, the existence of the forest and people is less important that the profit of few?

  • It is possible that these massive environmental destructions to be made because some companies that make the fesability study spend the majority of money taken from investors for these studies and let the investor hope that in the future they will make money while in the end the environment suffer? For them ( the investors) they invest in Gold.
  •  It is also possible that because of the level of math education in Canada these studies to have massive math errors?
  •  It is also possible that the profit would not be there and the investors would loose all the money because their money were used for the fesability study and the result was not fully understood by investors?

Links

http://antigoldgr.org/en/tag/halkidiki/page/6/

http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/content/protesters-greece-clash-police-over-gold-mine-again