Poisoned city fights to save its children

At an altitude of 13,000ft the Andean air is clear. A plume of white smoke rises from the chimney at the La Oroya smelter, hard at work refining arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium and copper. But today the company is not discharging any gases over this city in central Peru. 'It's a nice day, so the company won't be letting off any gases,' says Hugo Villa, a neurologist at the local hospital. 'They keep the worst emissions to overcast days or after dark.' When the gases are released, they make this one of the most polluted places on the planet, one of the country's 13 most polluted cities, the government said in 2001. The New York-based Blacksmith Institute in 2006 included it in a list of the 10 worst cases in the world, ranking it alongside Chernobyl for environmental devastation. The company is a US corporation, Renco Doe Run. The gases are the product from the main smelter a mile or two down the valley. The high mountains around keep out the cleansing winds, meaning that airborne metals are concentrated in the valley. Neither humans nor nature can escape the company's outpourings of poisons. And, despite evidence that gases have been behind the premature deaths of workers and residents young and old, the business-oriented, pro-US government of President Alan Garcia is too afraid of foreign investors to do anything about it. Horrific Pollution The pollution from the plant appears both horrific and difficult to contest. A study of 93 newborn children in the first 12 hours of their life, conducted by Hugo Villa, showed they had highly dangerous levels of lead in their blood, inherited from their mothers while in the womb. The nearer the mothers lived to the main smelter, the higher was the babies' level of lead poisoning. 'The effects of the lead are often difficult to trace,' said Villa. 'But it lodges permanently in bones and affects the liver, kidneys and the brain. It affects the central nervous system. I've had child patients who have lost feeling in their limbs and can't control themselves.' Medical studies by the non-governmental CooperAcción in 1999 and 2003 and by the US University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2005 found that most of the children under age six had four times more lead in their blood than the maximum amount established by the World Health Organization. The Doe Run complex's main chimney emits an average of 1.5 tones of lead and 810 tones of sulphur dioxide every 24 hours -- more than four times the maximum allowed under Peruvian legislation, which is 175 tones per day of sulphur dioxide, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines. The quality of air sampled in the neighborhood by three Peruvian voluntary agencies showed 85 times more arsenic, 41 times more cadmium and 13 times more lead than is safe. In parts of the town the water supply contains 50 percent more lead than levels recommended by the World Health Organization. The untreated waters of the Mantaro River are contaminated with copper, iron, manganese, lead and zinc and are not suitable for irrigation or consumption by animals, according to the standards supposed to be legally enforced in Peru. The water coming out of the nearby Huascacocha Lake contains more than four times the legal limit of manganese. It is no surprise, therefore, that the town has more than its fair share of youngsters with physical or mental disabilities. The company has a scheme under which a few hundred carefully selected children of Doe Run employees are taken for a few hours every day to a camp outside the town. With less money, the town council is trying to do something similar for children whose parents do not work for the company. None of this bears on the main problem - the pollution from the refineries. The problem here is such that adults chat about the lead levels in their blood. Pollution emergency plan instead of real action for La Oroya Far from the source that is poisoning La Oroya, the Peruvian government ordered a contingency plan for the days when air pollution is worst, as if it were dealing with a natural disaster. The Contingency Plan for States of Alert were be presented on Aug. 10 by the government's national environmental council, CONAM, which approved it Jul. 18 to protect the 35,000 inhabitants of La Oroya from the sulphur dioxide, lead and cadmium emissions from the Doe Run smokestacks. The plan is the result of two years of debates involving citizen groups, non-governmental organizations and the state agencies in charge of carrying it out, as well as representatives of the company, which will provide much of the financing. CONAM regional coordinator Carlos Rojas said there will be three levels of alert: watch, danger and emergency, according to which actions will be taken to limit the exposure of the affected population and partially halt two production lines of lead and copper at Doe Run. The degree of alert will be determined based on air quality and weather forecasts unfavorable to dispersal of the gases and particulates away from the city, such as lower temperatures and lack of wind. But none of the three levels entails ceasing operations at the smelting plant, Rojas said. Once a state of alert is ordered, it will be recommended that the most vulnerable -- children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with respiratory or cardiovascular illnesses -- should not be outdoors between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm local time, the worst period of the day for exposure. Doors and windows of homes, schools and hospitals should be closed, and food sold on the street should be covered. The population in general should cover mouth and nose with scarves and handkerchiefs when outside. The idea of facemasks was ruled out because "people don't want images that further dramatize the situation," said Rojas. In its first four months, the contingency plan will be centered on the reduction of emissions, and then will shift towards measures involving residents, through an information campaign. The city of La Oroya depends on Doe Run for economic survival, as most residents depend directly or indirectly on the smelting complex for work. For years the Oroyinos, as the locals are called, appeared to put up with their lot. In the past, union leaders and the mayor were persuaded by Renco Doe Run to side with it to block, successfully, the government's feeble attempts to force it to reduce pollution. 'We may move out, and you'll all lose your jobs, was the message,' said Pedro, one former employee, now an invalid. 'It was a question of deciding whether to have enough food to eat or not.' This year may be a little different. The town has elected a new mayor, César Gutiérrez, and the unions elected new leaders; and the effects of the pollution on children is finally getting through to parents. Gutiérrez, unlike his predecessor, has supported the alert program since he took office this year. "It is necessary to protect ourselves until the company complies with reducing pollution," he told Tierramérica. Furthermore, he has called on the mining investment supervisory body to report the results of the audit conducted on Doe Run at the beginning of the year. But its president, Alfredo Dammert, reports that this month it will be announced if there will be sanctions against the company, mainly for emissions of sulphur dioxide that it was required to reduce by 2007. Renco's record as a polluter is not confined to Peru. For nearly 13 years, according to industry reports, the company topped the US Environmental Protection Authority's list as the worst air polluter in the country.