MONKAYO, Compostela Valley—With a piece of cloth, Demetria Durano squeezes out a whitish object the size of a matchstick head from a shallow basin. Using a kilogram of mercury, she captures 5 grams of gold—worth P5,500—from a 45-kg bag of milled ore.

The 51-year-old woman works on the top floor of her three-story house in Sitio Summit, Mt. Diwata village, in Monkayo, Davao del Norte. In the basement is a jewelry display store and a makeshift ball mill, rolling drums where ore from the tunnels is crushed and milled.

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Like most residents of the gold-rich village of Diwata, popularly known as Diwalwal, Durano crudely extracts gold from milled ore by using mercury, a highly toxic heavy metal.

Almost daily, many of the estimated 18,000 small-scale miners in Diwalwal handle mercury and other deadly chemicals with bare hands and no protective masks, in spite of warnings by health authorities about the danger.

No clear alternative

“I’ve been doing this (handling mercury) since my mid-20s, when I first came here from Cebu,” said Durano, who settled to Diwalwal shortly after the gold boom in 1984. A cousin had made it big there.

Starting from picking discarded ore, or “wastes,” outside tunnel portals honeycombing the 1,000-meter-high, 729-hectare village, Durano was able to put up three ball mills and her current multistory house and own a tunnel, which employs dozens of small-time miners.

“With God’s help, nothing has happened to my health. I’m OK,” the mother of three grown-ups said.

Mercury use in Diwalwal is certain to stir controversy in the small-scale mining community which, at its peak in 1987, swelled to more than 200,000 people. Only last month, the Philippines signed an international accord banning the use of the toxic metal.

Efforts to ditch mercury in favor of safe methods of extracting gold have been pushed by municipal officials as early as 2000, but the lack of a clear alternative is a problem, according to Mayor Joselito Brillantes.

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Benguet and other areas with small-scale mining communities have long abandoned the use of quicksilver and resorted to borax and other safe methods of gold extraction.

“With mercury, miners can extract gold more efficiently. At three or four bags of good-grade ore, they can already catch at least 5 g [of gold],” Brillantes explained.

Stiff resistance

The mayor acknowledged that exposure to mercury was too big a health risk and the local government had tried to stop its use in Diwalwal.

A cease-and-desist order was issued by the local government in 2001, “but there was resistance from small-scale miners,” he said. “They refused to change their methods.”

The fight against mercury use was started by the incumbent mayor’s brother, Joel, who was mayor in 2001 until his murder. “We suspected that his firm stand against mercury use may have angered many miners, leading to his murder,” Brillantes said.

The mayor’s family owns JB Management and Mining Corp., one of the biggest “medium-scale” mining firms in Diwalwal.

The continued use of mercury in Diwalwal could be a test case for the Philippine enforcement of the United Nations-backed Minamata Convention, an international treaty that seeks to ban mercury use in over 130 countries. The accord, named after the Japanese city devastated by massive mercury poisoning in 1956, aims to eventually phase out mercury use by 2020.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), metallic mercury is deadly especially when its vapors are inhaled. “This exposure can occur when elemental (metallic) mercury is spilled or products containing mercury break and expose mercury to the air, particularly in warm or poorly ventilated indoor spaces,” the EPA said on its website.

Symptoms of mercury poisoning include tremors, emotional changes or mood swings, insomnia, neuromuscular changes such as weakness, twitching, headaches, cognitive performance deficits, among others. In extreme cases, mercury poisoning destroys kidneys or lungs leading to death.

High risk

Infants and children exposed to mercury have a high risk of impaired neurological development.

President Aquino issued Executive Order No. 79 last year, banning the use of mercury in small-scale mining.

Tests conducted by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (Unido) and the Department of Health (DOH) in early 2000 revealed high mercury contamination in Diwalwal, exacerbated by improper disposal of mercury-laced mine wastes, local health officials and residents said.

Mercury has also contaminated streams, waterfalls, rivers and other water sources of the village, and the people had to draw drinking water from a source 10 kilometers away, using hoses, said Lito Adlawan, another longtime resident.

“Mercury and other mining chemicals are poisoning the village, slowly killing us,” said Adlawan, 45, a jewelry maker. “It’s high time the government acts in helping solve the pollution problem in Diwalwal.”

A study by UK experts in late 1999 revealed mercury pollutants from Diwalwal streams flowed down to the Naboc River in Barangay Naboc, over 12 km away and contaminated rice paddies there.

Up to 90 milligrams of mercury was found per kilogram of silt in the river. Rice, fish and mussels from the area were found contaminated with mercury. Up to 38 percent of Naboc residents were also found to be “mercury intoxicated” after consuming rice and fish contaminated with the heavy metal.

Unhealthy place

Adlawan said the government should be firm on stopping the use of mercury.

Mercury is illegal, but in Diwalwal and in other mining areas in Compostela Valley, the metal is being sold in the black market for P5,000 to P8,000 per kilogram .

“The government should intervene and not be content with maximum tolerance,” Adlawan said in an interview late last month.

Health and local authorities warned that the high concentration of mercury and other chemicals used by over 100 ore-crushing plants have made Diwalwal an almost inhospitable place.

“It’s really not healthy to stay there,” said Sarah Tanghian, municipal administrator.

Tanghian said the government had drawn up a plan to relocate the gold-processing plants from Diwalwal to Sitio Mebatas in Upper Ulip village, 5 km from the foot of the gold-rich mountain.

A P20-million tailings dam in a 5-ha area in Mebatas, was finished in 2003 but miners and gold-processing plant owners refused to use it, officials said.

Easy money

Edilberto Arreza, Southern Mindanao director of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, said the Mebatas tailings dam was built as a long-term solution to the pollution in Diwalwal caused by mercury and other mine wastes dumped in the village’s waterways.

But for Diwalwal folk, the lure of easy money is hard to resist. For Aljun Bulacoy, using mercury is the only expedient way for miners to extract gold. The 18-year-old works as an operator of a six-drum ball mill in Diwalwal’s Patindol area, milling muck ores for 30 minutes and treating this with mercury—a technique locally known as “bubbling.”

He is paid P5,000 per batch of “ore loading,” or after milling some 300 bags of ore. Each bag weighs 45 kg. In a month, he can process up to 600 bags.

“We capture as much as 60 percent of the gold from ore waste using mercury,” said Bulacoy, who has been into the trade for just over a year, as he poured mercury from the edge of a shallow basin to a cough syrup bottle, before tightly turning the cap.

Asked why he wasn’t wearing a protective mask or gloves, Bulacoy replied, “It’s cumbersome.”

Durano, the ball mill owner, gave a similar reason for not wearing protective gear.

“I’m taking enough vitamins, just in case. And I always see to it my children do not come near the ball mills or whenever I’m doing the processing,” the woman said.

Health workers

Durano, however, admitted that decades of exposure to mercury have resulted in “throbbing headaches and I tend to be forgetful at times.”

Health teams from Unido and the DOH gave detoxification treatment to several Diwalwal residents in 2000 following results of tests validating mercury contamination in the gold-rich village, said Charlita Baluis, resident sanitary inspector in Diwalwal from 1993 to 2000.

“Four of my colleagues at the village health unit who were found to have high mercury levels in their bodies were treated,” Baluis said.

She admitted that she, too, was found to be contaminated by the heavy metal, but declined the detox for fear that the drug used in the process could complicate her asthma. She, instead, requested that she be treated at the municipal health office at the town proper, some 29 km from Diwalwal.

Baluis said she used to experience headaches and tremors, or involuntary muscle movements, which could be symptoms of mercury poisoning.

“Alternative treatment slowly cured me as the symptoms are now gone,” she said.

At least a dozen miners were randomly picked and detoxified, an almost negligible number compared to the total village population of 40,000 that time. Due to the costs of treatment (P35,000 per patient), the medical mission has not been repeated.

Squandered health

The health worker said adequate health awareness and education campaigns about mercury have been conducted in Diwalwal, but residents there seem incorrigible.

“And who can blame them? What’s important for them is to earn money for their families as quickly as possible. Using mercury, they can already process a bag of ore into a 5-g gold in a matter of minutes,” Baluis said.

She said people in Diwalwal tended to “squander their health in search of wealth.”

“After years of digging, they may find wealth but they get sick, so they squander that newfound wealth to search for health,” Baluis said.

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