Aluminum Smelter in Trinidad - Environment, Pollution, Crime, Industry

SUPER SIZE US
Mark Meredith
Cap-de-Ville/Chatham to lose twice what Union Estate did for Alcoa's smelter
Sunday, February 13th 2005

Union Industrial Estate takes shape in rural La Brea.
In the Oscar-nominated documentary film Super Size Me, director and guinea pig Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonalds for a month; breakfast, lunch and supper. When asked if he wants to be "super sized" he has to accept and gorge the huge cola and extra fries. The short junk diet nearly killed him.
Cabinet Minute No 3072 of October 28, 2004 confirms Trinidad and Tobago's lust for an even unhealthier diet, currently with no health warnings or regulations, which will last for decades. We are being super sized by the Government without our say-so and, say some, Parliamentary approval.
In a two-part investigation, freelance journalist MARK MEREDITH reports on Alcoa's proposed new aluminium smelter site at Cap-de-Ville and Chatham in Cedros, the Union Industrial Estate development in La Brea, and the new wave of industrialisation sweeping crowded Trinidad without appropriate legislation, transparency, and procedure.
Cabinet Minute 3072 authorises the National Energy Corporation (NEC) - acting for the Government and partner US aluminium giant Alcoa - "to take the necessary steps to cause to be acquired any privately-owned portions of land which are required for the development of the (Cap-de-Ville/Chatham) industrial estate and to develop, with urgency, the said estate".
They instruct that, "without prejudice to the work being undertaken by Alcoa and the NEC for the proposed smelter at Union Estate, Alcoa be offered an appropriate site at the Cap-de-Ville location".

Some of what the communities of Vessigny, Union and Sobo villages lost-rubber tree forest, or the "buffer zone" shielding them from the Union Estate development. Photos: MARK MEREDITH
For the communities of Cap-de-Ville and Chatham, on the once idyllic south west peninsular, life may soon never be the same again. If residents of the area have any doubts about what is about to overwhelm them, they don't have to travel far to have them dispelled.
Their neighbours in nearby Vessigny, Sobo and Union villages awoke one morning last year to find their verdant river valley and surrounding forest being decimated by diggers and backhoes contracted by NEC, a subsidiary of the National Gas Company (NGC).
The creation of Union Estate for Alcoa's aluminium smelter and "heavy gas-based industrial tenants" is set to swallow 465 ha (1,149 acres) of countryside. Today, hundreds of acres have been levelled and the landscape is one of shocking devastation, as desolate as the surface of Mars.
Soon it will be filled with factories producing hazardous substances and waste, but with no environmental laws enacted safeguarding the local
population-the Air Pollution Rules and the Water Pollution Rules.
However, 1,149 acres at Union Estate was too small, or "unsuitable" for Alcoa's aluminium smelter plant as well as heavy gas-based tenants. The Government wanted the smelter super sized from a capacity of 250,000 metric tonnes per year to 325,000 metric tonnes; hence Cabinet Note 3072.
The people of Cap-de-Ville and Chatham are poised to lose twice what their neighbours did for Alcoa's smelter, stretching from the Gulf of Paria to the Southern Main Road, an area of 810 ha, or 2,000 acres, or three square miles; almost severing the Cedros peninsular in half.
Or, put another way, if you took the area of central Toco (17 ha/ 45 acres) that the UNC Government intended to carve up for an industrial port in 2000, that would fit into Alcoa's proposed new industrial estate at Cap-de-Ville/Chatham 48 times.
"One hundred per cent of the project area will be cleared of vegetation," says NEC's October 18 Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) application to the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) for the "establishment of industrial estates to locate gas-based industries from Cap-de-Ville to Chatham". It will cost an estimated TT$408 million, says the application.
It may be instructive to the thousands of people in these communities and beyond-Prime Minister Patrick Manning spoke last year of a necklace, or chain of industrial estates sweeping south through Cedros - to look at the experience of the first community to be super sized by his government.
At Union Estate, the sudden obliteration of their beloved forest, river valley and abundant wildlife shocked residents to the core.
Union Village Council wrote to the EMA on July 6, 2004, three months after work began. "During this period, residents have been forced to experience the whirlwind clearing of hundreds of acres of natural vegetation, destruction of our dams, damaging of our beaches and general disruption of our lives.
"Though we are still trying to cope with the drastic, apparently inevitable change that is to befall our serene communities, we expect the EMA to do something to effectively monitor and control the havoc that is now being called 'development'."
Writing to the Express, humanist and naturalist Ishmael Samad summed up many letters on the controversy. He was scathing in his condemnation of NGC and the EMA's decision to issue a CEC to NGC:
"Never in the history of this country have citizens been subjected to such an onslaught on their sensibilities. Their lives have been impoverished by the degradation of the landscape that has been a source of delight for generations.
"The mindless destruction of our natural heritage continues unabated, the so-called 'developers' armed with their Certificates of Environmental Clearance," he wrote.
The first that many Board members of the EMA knew of the destruction at Union Estate was when they read about it in the press.
Unbeknown to them, the EMA had issued a CEC to NGC on March 24, 2004. Board members were said to be aghast and angry at the decision, one telling me that Union Estate represented a "total failure" by the EMA.
Examination of available documentation/correspondence for Union Industrial Estate in the CEC National Register at the EMA, reveals serious concerns by the EMA and Town and Country Planning Division (TCPD) over the proposal.
If you want to develop an industrial estate, you first have to obtain a CEC to prepare the land. You must tell the EMA what industries will be located there, the specifications, how the land will be subdivided. The EMA will give you Terms of Reference (TOR) for preparing your EIA which, if accepted, will give you a CEC.
Then, each separate industrial tenant must submit their own specific CEC application and a separate EIA according to the EMA's Terms of Reference.
NEC sent their EIA for the Union Industrial Estate, prepared by the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), to the EMA on December 20, 2003.
By March 2004, the EMA still did not know what industrial plants, apart from "potential" ones and the aluminium smelter, would be located at Union Estate; where; and to what specifications. And, NEC could not tell them.
On March 15, the TCPD wrote to the EMA with three pages of concerns over the Union Estate EIA and TOR.
The study area was not properly mapped, they said, lacking "precise acreage" of the development, scale, cadastral sheets and land use maps. There was no reserve proposed for the Vance River.
The estate was divided into three blocks, but it was "unclear if each individual block is to be further subdivided". There should be a conceptual plan for each block, the TCPD said, with plans indicating recreational areas, buffer zones, roads etc.
The three blocks comprised 305 ha that would be cleared and leveled, they said. This represented a "substantial loss of primary and secondary forest". The "significant impacts" were "not adequately addressed".
The TCPD were concerned about the loss of three dams in an area without a regular water supply. The proponents should consider preserving "at least one or two dams", but these have since been "dewatered" by NEC.
They were also concerned about traffic, Vessigny Beach Facility, the Pitch Lake, stands of rubber trees, relocation of settlements and the influx of residential development.
"The Terms of Reference (for the EIA) did not address the wider and long-range impacts to the La Brea area and its environs resulting from the establishment of an 'industrial estate' of this magnitude," wrote the TCPD, recommending deficiencies be addressed by the proponent.
Nevertheless, just nine days later on March 24, without any record in the National Register to show these deficiencies had been addressed, the CEC was issued for a development the EMA has said is in an area of "notable seismic activity", and clearing began.
However, for the La Brea Industrial Development Company (LABIDCO) clearing the site, the CEC granted was inadequate. One of its conditions needed super sizing.
CEC Condition (iii) (o) was of great importance to the residents surrounding Union Estate. It provided a "buffer zone with a minimal width of 100 metres which should be maintained in a greenfield state at the perimeter regions of the estate in close proximity to the Southern Main Road and residential settlements".
These "buffers" included stands of mature rubber trees which were supposed to shield residents from the stark landscape opening up before them.
But on June 9 and 10, "residents woke up to the sound of chain-saws humming away at the meagre stand of rubber trees left . . ." complained the Union Village Council in their July 6 letter to the EMA.
Residents contacted NEC's Mike Hamilton who assured them he would stop it. "Our thanks were short-lived," wrote the Council. "It is now 5 p.m. on July 6, 2004 and trees in that same stand are being attacked."
They were not to know that LABIDCO, meanwhile, had written to the EMA a week before on June 28 "formally requesting a change to the wording" of CEC Condition (iii) (o) regarding the buffer zone.
"Factors" in the construction made "this provision impractical", wrote operations manager Mike Hamilton. In October he would tell the Union Village community at a public meeting that "entering" the buffer zone "was a misunderstanding between ourselves and the EMA".
In fact, a month earlier on June 1, the EMA had served a Notice of Violation against NGC on ten separate counts of violating CEC conditions, one of which was the removal of the buffer zone.
Other violations of the CEC conditions for Union Estate by NGC included:
- inadequate security, barriers and signage;
- no dampening of soil to protect air quality;
- no deployment of sediment retention measures prior to commencement of works;
- no submission of a schedule to the EMA prior to activities starting;
- no liaison with natural resource agencies or NGOs prior to work;
- a failure to submit approvals from other line agencies; and
- the burning of vegetation.
NGC faces a possible fine by the EMA.
Indeed, NGC has spent many thousands of dollars on double-page, colour advertisements extolling a shining, gas-driven future and their own corporate responsibility towards the affected communities and environment of Union Estate.
"In the past, the onset of a major development has often been at the expense of the environment and built communities. However, today there is a greater environmental awareness and sensitivity among various levels of decision makers," the company claims in publicity material.
No such advertising space has been bought to tell the communities of Union Estate, Cap-de-Ville and Chatham of the consequences to their lives of the decision to clear the countryside to site dozens of potentially harmful industries next door.
To make up for the destruction of the Union Estate residents' rich, diverse forest and river valley wildlife habitats - 85 species of birds, 25 species of mammals, 35 species of butterflies and 100 floral species (42 of them rare and uncommon) - NGC has decided to embark on a reforestation scheme - in another part of Trinidad, the Morne L'Enfer Forest Reserve (south west conservancy) to be exact.
However, they will compensate the affected community with "recreational facilities", and "garbage bins" and a "nature trail" instead.
They advise in one such large advertisement (May 30, 2004), that in reaching its industrial position "there have been disappointments over the years but, as they say, 'no pain no gain'."
In Vessigny, Sobo, and Union Villages, there has been deep pain.
"If the EMA does not care for the people of the area they SHOULD care about the environment," wrote the Union Village Council in desperation in July. "We beg of you please do something to protect the little that is left. Enough bandages have already been used on these aching wounds."
But they may yet need more first aid.
At the October 27 public meeting at Union Village - seven months after the CEC approval for an industrial estate - residents still had to ask NGC/LABIDCO what type of industrial plants would be sited next door, and what the cumulative effects of these plants would be.
Mike Hamilton said he wasn't qualified to tell them about cumulative effects, and it was the EMA's job to determine which plants would come to the area. The EMA, however, had only seen potential industries listed in the EIA for Union Estate.
Hamilton was vague, saying he knew of "two definite takers" for the estate, later mentioning methanol and downstream formaldehyde and plastics production. The Alcoa smelter for La Brea was "not definite" and "we would not know until January...and then there would be debate about where the smelter would go", he told the community.
But his masters in Cabinet were quite certain about Union Estate's new tenants. There was no need for debate.
The very next day Cabinet Minute 3072 was issued declaring a super sized order of industry with trimmings.
Land would be acquired in Cap-de-Ville/Chatham for Alcoa, and "sites at Union Estate be reserved for: Two new ammonia plants; The Titanium Oxide Plant; The Syngas Refinery; The 750 MW Power Plant: The Iron/Steel Complex".
But wait, there's more. A CEC application for Union Estate, dated October 1, 2004, was lodged by the Ansa McAl group for a "Urea Ammonia Nitrate Complex: 1 ammonia plant, 1 urea plant, 1 nitric acid plant and 2 urea nitrate plants".
On December 15, 2004 a MOU was signed between T&T and Kansas-based Coffeyville Resources LLC in the US to produce 1.5 million tonnes of ammonia and 2 million tonnes of urea ammonium nitrate per year from Union Estate.
Meanwhile, some residents surrounding Union Estate had been trying to find out for themselves what was going on.
At the October consultation, one of them wanted to know from NGC why he couldn't access specifically Alcoa's application for a CEC for its smelter. He was told it should be available in the National Register and the EMA could not deny access - unless the client had requested confidentiality.
Last week I tried to access Alcoa's file for their June 2, 2004 CEC application and Terms of Reference for a smelter at Union Estate, and for their subsequent CEC application on January 7, 2005 for a smelter at Cap-de-Ville and Chatham. I was told Alcoa/NEC had requested confidentiality on both files.
Querying this denial under the Freedom of Information Act, I was only partly successful.
In part 2 of SUPER SIZE US next Sunday, MARK MEREDITH visits Alcoa's smelter site at Cap-de-Ville/ Chatham in the company of someone who has been warning the country of the unconstitutional and dangerous folly of an unregulated, super sized diet.