Southwest groundswell against smelter plan

However, this serenity could be lost forever if, in their view, Alcoa’s proposed aluminium smelter plant is built, bringing the social, economical and environmental problems associated with large-scale industrialisation.

Alcoa has lodged an application for a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) with the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) for the proposed construction of its aluminium smelter in the Cap-de-ville area in Southwestern Trinidad, according to a March 13 news release from Alcoa’s Pittsburgh office.

According to Alcoa, the CEC application will cause the EMA to develop a Terms of Reference, or instructions for completing a comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the proposed industrial facility.

Alcoa noted that the EIA process requires that the Terms of Reference must be open for public review before it is finalised.

Alcoa’s president of Primary Metals Development, Randy Overbey, said Alcoa was committed to a full and open EIA process to ensure that all of Trinidad and Tobago’s citizens have the opportunity to participate and be heard.

Alcoa, Overbey added, has posted its CEC application on Alcoa’s TT website, and has welcomed its widespread distribution.

Alcoa is hoping to build a 341,000 metric tonne per year (mtpy) aluminium smelter, an anode (electrical transmitting device) plant, and a cast house. The company said it expects that the completed smelter and associated facilities would permanently employ approximately 750 to 800 persons directly and indirectly through associated jobs.

Sunday Newsday recently visited the Southwest region and the residents indicated their opposition to the proposed smelter and the ongoing construction of the National Energy Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago Ltd (NEC) aluminum smelter plant at Union Estate, La Brea.

The area where the La Brea Union Estate aluminum industrial plant is to be built now resembles a wasteland. Clouds of dust billow through the air from the bulldozers and earthmovers that cleared away large areas of forests and vegetation.

NEC engineering superintendent Don Jones said the corporation was granted a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) for the proposed La Brea Union Industrial Estate.

Jones was responding to claims by the residents of Vessigny that the area has become a dust bowl from the excavation work. The residents say the dust is affecting their health.

However, Jones said the NEC was granted a CEC after an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) had been done.

He also noted, “If you’re building a house and excavation work is done, you will get dust. That’s why we are trying to minimise the dust in Vessigny with water trucks.”

Jones said the NEC is now attempting to get a CEC for the smelter plant.

Concerning relocation, he said, “Some 80 people in Union Village have to be relocated. We have held many meetings with them. Some of them want to be relocated en masse, others individually. We’re trying to meet everybody’s needs.”

Chatham resident Chunilal Roopnarine, who is a full time bee-keeper, said his business is in jeopardy if Alcoa is granted permission to build its aluminum plant in the Southwestern area.

“At present, my bee keeping business seems to be in great problems,” he said. “Because of the fact that if I have to relocate now, my business as a small scale entrepreneur would be in great danger. The destruction of the forest is going to directly hamper my business because the bees would have no forests to feed in, so they would have no honey to produce and for me to sell.”

Roopnarine also makes honey-based products like soaps, skin cream and hair food to sell.

All of his bee-related business will come to an end without the bee colonies inhabiting the area.

“Automatically, I would lose my business and I want to know what type of compensation would I and all the other residents receive from the powers-that-be,” he said.

Roopnarine claimed the residents in the La Brea Union Industrial Estate are suffering as a result of the aluminum smelter construction work.

“When we look at what has happened to the Union Estate people, they’re being treated like savages,” he claimed. “And they are breathing dust every day and some of them, who’ve never suffered from asthma before, are getting it now because they are getting dust day and night.”

Roopnarine continued, “Up to now there are residents there who still don’t know what house they are going to get, what size of house they’ll get.”

He alleged that similar signs of environmental destruction and social dislocation are slowly beginning to take place in the Chatham area.

Speaking from his home, Roopnarine said the proposed aluminum smelter is going to be much larger than what many citizens are being led to believe by the Government.

(Roopnarine and family live on private lands, and State lands are located across the road from his property).

“It’s going to be a very big industrial estate,” he claimed, “as they will be taking both sides of the road in Chatham where many people live. They’re claiming they are using one side of the road to build an Alcoa smelter and power plant, but that is not so. It’s an entire estate that they are going to be constructing in Chatham. Plus, there’s the docking facilities for ships and they want to build two docking facilities in Chatham. They’ve also applied for a new CEC to bulldoze extended acres of land to open the excess of the estate which would take the entire district of Chatham.”

Roopnarine then showed Sunday Newsday a row of heavy duty earth movers parked on a compound which he claims will be used to clear away acres and acres of peninsula land to build the Alcoa aluminum smelter and industrial estate.

An angry Roopnarine said should this occur, the entire area of Chatham would no longer exist as a living community in the future, with residents’ homes and agricultural lands, churches, mosques, mandirs (temples), health, outreach and community centres disappearing.

“There are approximately, 800 houses in the Chatham area with about 6,000 people and the lives of these 6,000 residents’ would be totally dislocated as a result of this project.”

Roopnarine alleged that everyone in the peninsula will be negatively affected once the large, forested areas are removed to make way for the proposed aluminum smelter project.

With the forests, he warned, the Southwest peninsula would become vulnerable to hurricanes.

“If I could take you back to the year 1933,” he said, “the hurricane that hit us that year came from Venezuela across the waters which flattened the whole of Icacos, Cedros, Granville and Chatham. There were not many deaths from it, but there was total devastation of the cocoa estates and cocoa industry and, from then on, the authorities decided not to continue developing Chatham and peninsula but to develop the Port-of-Spain area.”

Roopnarine claimed that their MP was indifferent to their plight.

Psychologically, he said, the issue was taking a toll on the residents because their lives are now in limbo.

“I can’t do any repairs to my leaking roof because I don’t know what will happen,” he stressed, “and then you have folks who own little backyard gardens or extensive, agricultural properties are in limbo because they don’t know whether they are going to be compensated in the right way for their crops and whether they should continue or not.”

As for Point Fortin, he added, this town would be affected by the Alcoa aluminum smelter project through the loss of a crucial watershed area.

“This plan, according a recent Government hydrologist report,” he remarked, “calls for the building of the smelter plant exactly over the Buenos Ayres aquifer that stretches into the Chatham Forest Reserve. Now, water is something that this country could never find itself producing enough for its people, and here we’re going to be destroying a forest that protects a watertable in a watershed area.”

He said that same water is used to supply Point Fortin residents so the aquifer will eventually become polluted by the waste material stored on the aluminum industrial estate like poisonous cyanide and fluorides.

Roopnarine wondered aloud how and where will these chemicals be stored on the proposed aluminum smelter industrial estate.

“Excessive fluorides causes brittle bones in people and animals who are exposed to it over a long period of time,” he said,” “so there are dangerous long-term effects.”

He said water left in the ground would not be fit for human consumption.

“So, the people from Point Fortin, I have to warn them, are going to be slowly poisoned by the water they’ll get daily from Chatham.”

Roopnarine claimed the Cedros, Icacos, Granville, Fullerton residents will also have to deal with the increased stress of traffic jams while driving past the huge aluminum smelter industrial complex on both sides of the road to get into Point Fortin.

“Should there be a catastrophe in this proposed aluminum smelter estate, what will happen to these people?”

He said this industrial project and its side effects are not simply “price of progress.”

“This is not progress but rather putting money into the pockets of big conglomerates without regard for the people,” he said.

Meanwhile, longtime area resident, Yvonne Ashby, 75, described the proposed industrial project for the Southwest region as “an act of wickedness” on the residents by the powers-that-be.

She said the ongoing quarrel between the residents, the Government and Alcoa is a little more than a year old.

“We just don’t know what to do because we can’t fix our homes nor do much with our gardens,” she said, “and I’ve never seen like this in my born life.”

Ashby, a nurse, was born and raised in the Southwest region and lives with her 44-year-old daughter in a comfortable house. She pointed to a large area of land she said belonged to her family since the 19th century, but was now under threat from the industrial project.

“This is my land and I’m very much tied up and bonded here,” she stressed. “So if my land is taken away from me, where am I to go?”

Ashby claimed neither the Government nor Alcoa has spoken to them about the compensation issue.

“No, because they thought they would ride over us and thought they could appease us with a basketball court for the young people and a community centre,” she said angrily, “but we don’t want no community centre and basketball court, we want fair play, justice, dignity and no aluminum smelter plant. It’s a dirty industry and they cannot do it in America so why should they bring it here.”

She pointed in the direction of the Erin water basin and the surrounding areas which, she said, is full of water wells and springs.

“In America, especially in Miami, Federal Law prohibits anybody to build near, close to or upon aquifers, and Alcoa knows that.”

Ashby was stunned to read about Alcoa being heavily fined in the USA for polluting the St Lawrence Waterway in the late 1980s or early 90s, and that the corporation was planning to build a smelter plant here.

“Could I say that the decision makers of this country are ignorant of environmental laws or are they so easily fooled that whatever foreign or multi-national company comes down here they believe?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she stressed, “I’m not giving up without a fight and this issue concerns the entire country.”

Dr Raphael Sebastien, a resident who has been a leader against the Alcoa aluminum smelter complex, said Third World countries are becoming the experimentation grounds for First World countries which do not tolerate bad ecological practices in their own lands.

“And we are facilitating them,” he emphasised.

Sebastien summed up the project as industrialisation gone very mad.

proposed smelter and the ongoing construction of the National Energy Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago Ltd (NEC) aluminium smelter plant at Union Estate, La Brea.

The area where the La Brea Union Estate aluminium industrial plant is to be built now resembles a wasteland. Clouds of dust billow through the air from the bulldozers and earthmovers that cleared away large areas of forests and vegetation.

NEC engineering superintendent Don Jones said the corporation was granted a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) for the proposed La Brea Union Industrial Estate.

Jones was responding to claims by the residents of Vessigny that the area has become a dust bowl from the excavation work. The residents say the dust is affecting their health.

However, Jones said the NEC was granted a CEC after an EIA had been done.

He also noted, “If you’re building a house and excavation work is done, you will get dust. That’s why we are trying to minimise the dust in Vessigny with water trucks.”

Jones said the NEC is now attempting to get a CEC for the smelter plant.

Concerning relocation, he said, “Some 80 people in Union Village have to be relocated. We have held many meetings with them. Some of them want to be relocated en masse, others individually. We’re trying to meet everybody’s needs.”

Chatham resident Chunilal Roopnarine, who is a full-time bee-keeper, said his business is in jeopardy if Alcoa is granted permission to build its aluminium plant in the Southwestern area.

“At present, my bee-keeping business seems to be in great problems,” he said. “Because of the fact that if I have to relocate now, my business as a small-scale entrepreneur would be in great danger. The destruction of the forest is going to directly hamper my business because the bees would have no forests to feed in, so they would have no honey to produce and for me o sell.” Roopnarine also makes honey-based products like soaps, skin cream and hair food to sell.

All of his bee-related business will come to an end without the bee colonies inhabiting the area.

“Automatically, I would lose my business and I want to know what type of compensation would I and all the other residents receive from the powers-that-be,” he said.

Roopnarine claimed the residents in the La Brea Union Industrial Estate are suffering as a result of the aluminium smelter construction work.

“When we look at what has happened to the Union Estate people, they’re being treated like savages,” he claimed.

“And they are breathing dust every day and some of them, who’ve never suffered from asthma before, are getting it now because they are getting dust day and night.”

Roopnarine continued, “Up to now there are residents there who still don’t know what house they are going to get, what size of house they’ll get.”

He alleged that similar signs of environmental destruction and social dislocation are slowly beginning to take place in the Chatham area.

Speaking from his home, Roopnarine said the proposed aluminium smelter is going to be much larger than what many citizens are being led to believe by the Government.

(Roopnarine and family live on private lands, and State lands are located across the road from his property).

“It’s going to be a very big industrial estate,” he claimed, “as they will be taking both sides of the road in Chatham where many people live. They’re claiming they are using one side of the road to build an Alcoa smelter and power plant, but that is not so. It’s an entire estate that they are going to be constructing in Chatham. Plus, there’s the docking facilities for ships and they want to build two docking facilities in Chatham. They’ve also applied for a new CEC to bulldoze extended acres of land to open the excess of the estate which would take the entire district of Chatham.”

Roopnarine then showed Sunday Newsday a row of heavy duty earth movers parked on a compound which he claims will be used to clear away acres and acres of peninsula land to build the Alcoa aluminium smelter and industrial estate.

An angry Roopnarine said should this occur, the entire area of Chatham would no longer exist as a living community in the future, with residents’ homes and agricultural lands, churches, mosques, mandirs (temples), health, outreach and community centres disappearing.

“There are approximately 800 houses in the Chatham area with about 6,000 people and the lives of these 6,000 residents would be totally dislocated as a result of this project.”

Roopnarine alleged that everyone in the peninsula will be negatively affected once the large, forested areas are removed to make way for the proposed aluminium smelter project.

Without the forests, he warned, the Southwest peninsula would become vulnerable to hurricanes.

“If I could take you back to the year 1933,” he said, “the hurricane that hit us that year came from Venezuela across the waters which flattened the whole of Icacos, Cedros, Granville and Chatham. There were not many deaths from it, but there was total devastation of the cocoa estates and cocoa industry and, from then on, the authorities decided not to continue developing Chatham and peninsula but to develop the Port-of-Spain area.”

Roopnarine claimed that their MP was indifferent to their plight.

Psychologically, he said, the issue was taking a toll on the residents because their lives are now in limbo.

“I can’t do any repairs to my leaking roof because I don’t know what will happen,” he stressed, “and then you have folks who own little backyard gardens or extensive, agricultural properties are in limbo because they don’t know whether they are going to be compensated in the right way for their crops and whether they should continue or not.”

As for Point Fortin, he added, this town would be affected by the Alcoa aluminium smelter project through the loss of a crucial watershed area.

“This plan, according a recent Government hydrologist report,” he remarked, “calls for the building of the smelter plant exactly over the Buenos Ayres aquifer that stretches into the Chatham Forest Reserve. Now, water is something that this country could never find itself producing enough of for its people, and here we’re going to be destroying a forest that protects a watertable in a watershed area.”

He said that same water is used to supply Point Fortin residents so the aquifer will eventually become polluted by the waste material stored on the aluminium industrial estate like poisonous cyanide and fluorides. Roopnarine wondered aloud how and where will these chemicals be stored on the proposed aluminium smelter industrial estate.

“Excessive fluorides causes brittle bones in people and animals who are exposed to it over a long period of time,” he said,” “so there are dangerous long-term effects.” He said water left in the ground would not be fit for human consumption.

“So, the people from Point Fortin, I have to warn them, are going to be slowly poisoned by the water they’ll get daily from Chatham.”

Roopnarine claimed the Cedros, Icacos, Granville, Fullerton residents will also have to deal with the increased stress of traffic jams while driving past the huge aluminium smelter industrial complex on both sides of the road to get into Point Fortin.

“Should there be a catastrophe in this proposed aluminium smelter estate, what will happen to these people?” He said this industrial project and its side effects are not simply “price of progress.”

“This is not progress but rather putting money into the pockets of big conglomerates without regard for the people,” he said.

Meanwhile, longtime area resident, Yvonne Ashby, 75, described the proposed industrial project for the Southwest region as “an act of wickedness” on the residents by the powers-that-be.

She said the ongoing quarrel between the residents, the Government and Alcoa is a little more than a year old.

“We just don’t know what to do because we can’t fix our homes nor do much with our gardens,” she said, “and I’ve never seen like this in my born life.”

Ashby, a nurse, was born and raised in the Southwest region and lives with her 44-year-old daughter in a comfortable house. She pointed to a large area of land she said belonged to her family since the 19th century, but was now under threat from the industrial project.

“This is my land and I’m very much tied up and bonded here,” she stressed. “So if my land is taken away from me, where am I to go?” Ashby claimed neither the Government nor Alcoa has spoken to them about the compensation issue.

“No, because they thought they would ride over us and thought they could appease us with a basketball court for the young people and a community centre,” she said angrily, “but we don’t want no community centre and basketball court, we want fair play, justice, dignity and no aluminium smelter plant. It’s a dirty industry and they cannot do it in America so why should they bring it here.”

She pointed in the direction of the Erin water basin and the surrounding areas which, she said, is full of water wells and springs. “In America, especially in Miami, Federal Law prohibits anybody to build near, close to or upon aquifers, and Alcoa knows that.”

Ashby was stunned to read about Alcoa being heavily fined in the USA for polluting the St Lawrence Waterway in the late 1980s or early ’90s, and that the corporation was planning to build a smelter plant here. “Could I say that the decision makers of this country are ignorant of environmental laws or are they so easily fooled that whatever foreign or multi-national company comes down here they believe?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she stressed, “I’m not giving up without a fight and this issue concerns the entire country.”

Dr Raphael Sebastien, a resident who has been a leader against the Alcoa aluminium smelter complex, said Third World countries are becoming the experimentation grounds for First World countries which do not tolerate bad ecological practices in their own lands.

“And we are facilitating them,” he emphasised. Sebastien summed up the project as industrialisation gone very mad.