West Papua:
Eight dead as company ignores warning

The notorious Freeport-McMoRan mining company, ignored 
warnings that a landslide was imminent and two days later, eight 
workers were killed under an avalanche of 2.5 million tonnes of 
rock and mud at their Grasberg mine. Five others are said to be 
recovering from injuries, including Muhammad Samsuri, who lost 
both legs.

The mine is 16 percent owned by Rio Tinto.

Too greedy to halt production of the world's richest gold mine 
for a few days, the company took the risk with its employees' 
lives, leaving workers at the bottom of a pit, hoping the 
expected slide would stop on a 90-metre step cut into the wall 
above them. It didn't.

They took this risk with workers' lives after five days of heavy 
rain.

Three weeks after the October 9 tragedy, four bodies still 
remained buried in the pit.

Workers at the mine are concerned that more could have been done 
to prevent the disaster. Management's attitude since has done 
little to install confidence.

Only a week after the tragedy, the company's chairman and chief 
executive, Jim Bob Moffett, was doing his best to play down the 
significance of the landslide and reassure financial analysts who 
could damage share prices.

"We move 750 [thousand] up to a million tonnes a day and just to 
be straightforward with you if we had to focus all of our earth-
moving equipment on this we could clean it up in three days."

Although he promised Freeport would do what it could to find out 
what happened, he did not mention the data that showed a slide 
was imminent.

Because the wall involved was always at risk, there were more 
than a dozen extensometre devices to measure the rate of 
movement.

Investigator, Witoro Soelarno, of the Indonesian Department of 
Energy and Mineral Resources said that according to the mine's 
operating procedures a movement of more than 10mm a day means 
"possible pit slope failure". In early October, the movement of 
the slope picked up speed and by October 5 parts of it were 
moving at 20mm and 30mm a day, Mr Witoro said.

And while on October 7, two days before the slide, Freeport moved 
its stationary mining equipment on the 90-metre step out of the 
zone where it expected the slide to hit, but left workers like 
Muhammad Samsuri to continue working as usual in the pit below!

Peter Lilly, chairman of mining engineering at Curtin University 
in Western Australia, said such large loss of life was very rare 
in open-cut mines because slides can usually be predicted. 
Engineers monitored the weak spots and, if they started to move, 
managers moved workers out of the way.

In response to questions from the Sydney Morning Herald the 
company said: "We have always been strongly committed to safety 
in all phases of our operations and our safety department has a 
very good record".

No doubt the occupying Indonesian authorities will back the 
company, and it will be business as usual. What do they care 
about a few Papuan lives?