Tests affirm water, fish quality at Padcal rivers

By TotengTanglao

 TUBA, Benguet --—The quality of water at tributaries near Philex Mining Corp’s Padcal Mines, including a creek and a river in nearby Itogon town and downstream to the irrigation canal in Pangasinan remains below effluent standards set by government and some foreign environmental commissions.

            

This according to the tests conducted June 12 on samples taken by the Joint Multipartite Monitoring Team (JMMT) in eight water-sampling stations at Padcal’s Tailings Storage Facility No. 3 (TSF3), the convergence area of Balog Creek and Agno River, San Roque Dam, and down to the irrigation canal of the National Irrigation Administration, in San Manuel, Pangasinan.

“The latest set of tests sustained the assurance made by Philex Mining since last year that the tailings-leak accident at TSF3 on Aug. 1, 2012 did not bring toxic materials into Balog Creek, Agno River, and San Roque Dam,” Michael Toledo, senior vice president for Corporate Affairs at Philex Mining, said.

            

Led by government regulators, the JMMT is also composed of Philex Mining environment staff and third-party experts tasked to monitor, among other things, the effluent standards at Padcal as well as the tributaries where nontoxic water from TSF3 discharges into.

            

Effluent standards, as set in Administrative Order Nos. 34 and 35 of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), refer to the restriction imposed by government on quantities, rates, and concentrations of material in water discharges.

            

The tests done by CRL Environmental Corp., a full-service laboratory, showed that total suspendedsolids (TSS), a water-quality measurement, averaged 8.25 milligrams per liter (mg/L), which is way below the 50 mg/L standard set by government, according to Libby Ricafort, vice president at Philex Mining and resident manager of Padcal Operations.

Water samples also passed the acceptable standards for toxicity as tests showed the following levels: cadmium at 0.006 milligram per liter (mg/L), as against the DENR limit of 0.02 mg/L, copper at 0.02 mg/L (versus 1 mg/L), lead at 0.04 mg/L (0.1 mg/L), chromium at 0.02 mg/L (0.05 mg/L), and mercury at 0.0001 mg/L (0.002 mg/L).

            

The fish samples taken from the Balog-Agno convergence area and downstream of Agno River in several towns leading to San Manuel, Pangasinan, also showed amounts of accumulated heavymetals—mercury, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and copper—below the limits set by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.

            

The examination was done between April and June by the SentrosaPagsusuri, Pagsasanay at Pangangasiwang Pang-Agham at Teknolohiya Corp. (SentroTek) on tissue samples of tilapia and eel, which are abundant in the said tributaries.

            
The fish samples taken from Agno River also passed all the environmental quality standards set by the European and Paris Commissions and by the United States Food and Drug Administration, making the fish fit