Cepa to lead environmental audit of Porgera Mine

THE Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (Cepa) will lead a major environmental audit into the Porgera Mine, says acting managing director Jude Tukuliya.
The audit will cover the Porgera mine’s operations from when it started in the 1980s to the present day, and highlight perennial environmental legacy issues.
Tukuliya, who oversaw the transfer of the environment permit to the New Porgara Limited in September last year, said environmental legacy issues must be addressed as a matter of priorit.
Tukuliya said the environment plan for the Porgera Mine was approved and the environment permit granted in 1989 by the Government.
He said planning in the 1980s looked at ways of containing tailings and the large volumes of competent (hard) waste rock and incompetent (soft) rock required to be stripped to access to the gold ore body.
No feasible options were found since any structure to store fine-grained and saturated materials close enough to the mine was determined unstable and likely to fail due to the inherent instability of the poor foundation conditions in a seismically active area.
He said a solution was found to store as much waste material as practicable in the Porgera Valley. The Government granted approval for the open disposal of treated tailings into the river system and storage of waste rocks at engineered dumps.
Tukuliya said the riverine tailings disposal was not an accepted waste management and good mining practice and is globally condemned but was approved for the Porgera mine waste disposal.
He added that river pollution and mine waste related contamination of the Porgera-Lagaip-Strickland River system and environmental damage claims by riverine communities were long standing issues.