Bronwen Jones
TEARS and righteousness make a potent mix in an angry young woman out to fight the wealth and might of big industry. Sitting atop a crumbledown dam looking over her community, Rene Smith, 21, adjusts blue rimmed spectacles and says: “We will not let them build their dam on our doorsteps. We will not let Merriespruit happen twice.”
Working for a firm of engineering consultants, she has a better than average understanding of plans to construct a R16,8-million slimes dam at Fleurhof, in apparent disregard for those interred in the mud of Merriespruit and in the Bafokeng disaster 20 years earlier.
Rand Mines Properties (RMP) wants to clear 50 mine dumps around Johannesburg, reclaiming the gold and making industrial land available for building. To do so, it must dump the dirt at Fleurhof.
Smith says: “The Merriespruit court case is still pending and yet they expect us to happily accept Fraser Alexander, the same firm of engineers.” She is angry at what she feels is RMP’s and the Minister for Mineral and Energy Affairs’ placing of the economy and the country first. “They are so convinced of their own importance they have forgotten we are important too.
“It may not have been me who bought a house in Fleurhof, but my parents did. They have been building up a legacy for me and my brother. Now it is worth nothing. Yesterday an estate agent told me, ‘Fleurhof is a dead zone’.”
The community is united in its opposition to the new dam, with each of the 450 households signing the petition delivered to Pik Botha, Minister for Mineral and Energy Affairs. They have a fighting fund and a committee fast getting a grip on environmental impact assessments and the finer points of dam building. They have employed a separate firm of consultants to independently assess the dangers of the massive structure.
While there are dumps nearby, they are a dusty irritation, not a looming menace, and were there before Fleurhof. RMP’s plan is to merge a group of tumble down dumps not used in decades into one mega-dump. Again breaching engineering wisdom, it will place new material on an old structure. It will dump and process 24 hours a day, 324 days a year, for the next 12 to 15 years.
Slimes dams are not walled in by concrete. They have vast banks of earth and sand holding back a porridge of fine industrial waste. A porridge that, once it flows, is unstoppable.
Every year, on average, there are two slimes dams failures in South Africa. The year that they started to build the dams at Merriespruit, there was a major failure at Impala Platinum Mines, known as the Bafokeng disaster. The slimes poured into a mine shaft, killing the men below, and flowed on the surface for 25 kilometres.
Fleurhof is, at best, 300 metres from the site of the intended mega-dam. While RMP promises daily, weekly and monthly checks, there is always the possibility of human error.
In February last year, when the Merriespruit slimes dam burst, 17 people died and some who survived live lives of indescribable misery. The trial of officials for culpable homicide starts in March.
Community leader Eugene Marais says: “It’s an accident waiting to happen. We will not let it be
The old slimes dams at Fleurhof were used in the 1920s. The community itself was not established until around 1974.
Fleurhof was established as a white community but, with Soweto too close for comfort after the 1976 uprising, residents fled. Indians turned the township down. But coloureds, used to being betwixt and between, moved in gladly.
“There is nothing you can say to convince someone who is frightened,” says Dick Plaistowe, director of RMP’s land clearing and gold recovery division. He is aggrieved that Fleurhof is attracting attention, and says RMP has had to produce a R28 000 video to explain how benign the scheme is, as well as spending tens of thousands of rands on models, brochures, consultations and helicopter trips for various committees.
Plaistowe argues the dumping ground is essential for RMP to continue to employ 620 people. But Fleurhof residents would sell their homes to RMP if they could. While Plaistowe insists the development will not cause property prices to drop, he says RMP doesn’t want to buy the houses in Fleurhof, valued at R81-million. He says the company has no choice over its dumping ground. The gold processing is so marginal that it is not economic to take the debris further afield.
Work was due to start on the mega-dump last month, but has been delayed by the residents’ protests.
“With the extraordinary safety measures being taken, living next to the dam is the same risk as living normal daily life.”
Marais says this is illogical, and if the dam fails, he believes RMP is underinsured, with only R3,5-million in its mine closure fund at the moment.”There are already miners’ graves on top of the dam. We don’t want a mass grave at its side.”
The shadow of Merriespruit lies long on the ground of Fleurhof. Divided by a distance of several hundred kilometres, the living of one community and the dead of the other seem melded in their fear of what lies ahead: fear of the mud.