Located in Huayuan County, several towns around the border towns are famous for their rich reserves of non-ferrous metals. There are more than 20 kinds of proven minerals in Huayuan, among which manganese ore and lead-zinc ore rank second and third respectively in China. Mining-related output value once occupied more than 90% of the county's total industrial output value.
In the tourism mode, the border town remains relatively natural and primitive. However, Maoer Township, Tuanjie Town and other mineral-rich towns have embarked on another road after resource development, and the local economy has developed by leaps and bounds. But behind the high industrial output value is the constant intrusion of pollution and destruction in the development process.
On the surface, these towns are no different from border towns: Miao buildings with wooden structures, rice fields where fish swim and ducks play, and villages surrounded by mountains. The difference is that there are children whose blood lead exceeds the standard by three times, polluted soil and water, and many tailings ponds lying in the mountains like untimely bombs.
In 20 13, the local government put forward the goal of "changing gardens into gardens" in urban and rural construction, and the once chaotic mining industry was also integrated in a series of actions. Once, a recent field survey found that as a pillar industry of county economy, there were still some irregularities in mining and processing. Under the contiguous mines and tailings ponds, the remaining problems are far from being removed, and the pollution continues.
Lead poisoning children
When his wife gave birth to her third child, Wu Zhihua once discussed with the family planning staff: "Our second child is in poor health, can we avoid paying a fine?" The second son suffers from epilepsy and is short in stature. His father Wu Zhihua knows very well that this has something to do with the lead-zinc mine in the village.
Wu Zhihua is a mine car driver. His home and work place are in Dongli Village, Maoer Township, Huayuan County. Three years ago, two boys in the family were found to have "moderate lead poisoning in children". According to the diagnostic criteria of blood lead in China, the normal level of blood lead in children should be 0-99 μ g/L, and the highest value of Wu Zhihua's youngest son is 4 13 μ g/L, which is three times higher than the standard.
At first, the villagers didn't realize that pollution had invaded the children. Mining in Dongli village has been going on for about 20 years. The villagers noticed that the water level dropped and the dust increased, and the crops might be affected, but they seldom considered the health problems.
The detection storm started at 20 14. The only migrant population in the village, a Wenzhou native who specializes in repairing the tires of mine cars, found that the children developed late. 20 14 went to the hospital for examination and found that blood lead exceeded the standard.
At this point, the villagers realized the danger. Wang Enze, a villager in Dongli Village, recalled that there were always 54 children who had been examined at that time, and the results were all blood lead exceeding the standard.
Huayuan County CDC realized that the problem was serious and sent people to the village to take blood tests for children. The government chartered twice to organize children to go to the affiliated hospital of Hunan Provincial Institute of Occupational Disease Prevention and Treatment for treatment, and paid the medical expenses. However, according to the villagers, the government has done nothing since then.
For the incident of excessive blood lead, the reporter once asked whether the village had received relevant compensation from mining enterprises. Wang Enze waved his hand and made a gesture of stuffing his pocket: "The relationship behind it is complicated."
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ In Laowangzhai Village, Tuanjie Town, most villagers buy bottled water to drink.
Wu Zhihua communicated with the local authorities at the end of 20 16, and the other party said that "the government has no funds now, and we have to wait until the end of the year". A year passed and the villagers didn't wait for an answer. The provincial hospital called to urge the children to review, but Wu Zhihua didn't go because he had no money.
Wu Zhihua is a family of seven. My father was paralyzed, my mother cooked and farmed, and my wife took care of three children in the town to go to school. He is the only labor force in the family. He earns up to four or five thousand yuan a month by driving, barely meeting the daily expenses of the whole family.
Although he is suffering from pollution now, Wu Zhihua is still inseparable from the mining factory. He has to work to make money.
Among the checklists kept by Wu Zhihua's family, the earliest one came from Hunan Children's Hospital. It was August of 20 14, and he took his second son to Changsha for inspection at his own expense. At that time, the blood lead content was 235 micrograms per liter.
20 14, 10 In June, Huayuan County Center for Disease Control and Prevention detected that the blood lead content of Wu Zhihua's second son was 4 13 μ g/L. From 2065438 to September 2005, this figure became 404 μ g/L, still exceeding the standard by three times. During this year, the child has received two courses of lead excretion treatment, and the diagnosis opinion column clearly States: "Avoid contact with lead pollution, and check blood lead after one month."
In the past two years, the lead-zinc mine next to the village has been running as usual, and the children's review has never been done.
"Home is here, where can people go?" Wu Zhihua's words are full of helplessness.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
Wu Zhihua's second son
The laboratory test shows that his blood lead content is three times higher than the standard?
Contaminated soil, water and rice
In Laowangzhai Village, Tuanjie Town, 2 1km away from Dongli Village, Liu Xiuxiu/kloc-0 released a video in the circle of friends on October 24th. In the picture, a white water stream drops from a height. Afraid that people outside the stockade wouldn't believe it, she specifically confessed that it was taken on the spot that morning and added: "How can people live in this water?"
Laowangzhai Village is located halfway up the mountain. When the villagers looked up, they could see the gray mining area between the green hills, from which water flowed down. For a long time, villagers have brought mountain spring water home. After the mine was developed, they found that the drinking water had changed.
It's usually better. If it rains, dregs will always flow out of the water pipes, and even the water is white. The villagers think this is water pollution caused by tailings. An old man complained to the reporter: "Don't be kidding, this is the potion we drank."
On the mountain, the tailings flowing down after ore washing are grayish white and thick in color, which contains chemicals and lime for mineral processing at the same time, and continuously flow to the nearby tailings pond every day. The villagers believe that some mining enterprises do not set up protective measures according to regulations, which leads to water pollution from tailings of drinking water sources.
After careful calculation, the villager Wang found that there are five tailings ponds around that can affect their village, belonging to several major industries such as Yufeng Company.
Now most villagers are still washing vegetables and cooking with the water flowing down from the mountain, while drinking 8 yuan a barrel of bottled water. Many villagers installed water purifiers at their own expense, and some people bought portable water quality testing pens.
They use the "dots" displayed on the test pen to distinguish the quality of water. The water filtered by the water purifier shows 006, which the villagers call "6 points", and the water flowing down from the mountain is 297 points. Although the value of 297 is high, it does not exceed the relevant national standards. What the villagers don't know is that the ppm behind the number is the hardness unit of water, which refers to the concentration of calcium and magnesium ions in water, while heavy metal elements such as lead and mercury can't be detected by the detection pen.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ In Laowangzhai Village, Tuanjie Town, some villagers bought water quality testing pens.
Villager Wu Xiuqin recalled that the water purifier company had tested it when it came to promote it. At that time, the value was more than 400, and the results measured after rain would be different from those measured on sunny days. Wu Xiuqin believes that she and several other elderly people in the village have stones related to drinking high water for a long time.
In addition to drinking water, the soil and crops around the mining area are generally affected. Chen Nengchang, an expert in soil remediation and a researcher at Guangdong Institute of Eco-environmental Technology, analyzed that if tailings spread into the surrounding environment in the form of floating dust, wastewater and waste residue, some heavy metal elements may enter water or soil, and then be deposited in the human body through drinking water and food. The typical case is the "pain" caused by cadmium pollution in rice fields in Shentongchuan, Japan, and the rice fields around many mines in China are also polluted.
At the annual meeting of Health, Environment and Development Forum held in Beijing in June165438+1October this year, Hu, an expert from Hunan CDC, published relevant research results. He conducted a special monitoring survey on more than 0/000 samples of circulating rice/kloc-0 in various cities and counties of Hunan Province in May, 2065,438+0-2065,438+0. The results showed that the average over-standard rate of cadmium in rice was 24.3%.
Team Hu also conducted an investigation. Through epidemiological investigation and physical examination of selected population (9 18 valid samples) in Hunan Province, biological samples such as urine and blood were collected to detect the cadmium content in the samples. The results showed that chronic mild cadmium poisoning was as high as 79.09%.
Cadmium in rice is generally considered to come from contaminated soil. Hu pointed out in the data that the mining of metal mines is one of the reasons for soil cadmium pollution in Hunan, the hometown of non-ferrous metals. Acid mine wastewater containing a lot of cadmium ions is produced during mining, and the wastewater enters? Rivers and soils cause heavy metal pollution.
In July this year, an environmental protection organization went to Huayuan County for investigation, and collected 10 samples from five villages around the mining area, and compared them with the samples from two non-mining areas in border towns, and then submitted them to a third-party independent laboratory for testing.
The test results show that four heavy metal elements, such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and zinc, all exceed the standard, and the exceeding rate of each element is above 80%, among which the exceeding rate of cadmium and zinc is 100%, and the highest exceeding rate of cadmium is 87.8 times. However, the contents of lead and zinc in the non-mining soil of the control group did not exceed the standard, and the other two items exceeded the standard 1 times.
Among the above tests, for grain, the test results of villages around the mining area show that arsenic, lead and chromium have exceeded the standard, while cadmium has not exceeded the standard. The over-standard rate of chromium is 100%, and the maximum over-standard rate of lead is 6 times. In contrast, only 0.25 times of chromium in the border town samples exceeded the standard, and the rest did not exceed the standard or lacked relevant industry standards.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ Tailings water continuously flows down the mountain.
Tailings pond around the village
In the eyes of villagers, only a small amount of tailings water enters the water body and soil through leakage, and the vast majority of tailings will be discharged into the artificial reservoir formed by the dam through pipelines.
During the field investigation in Maoer Township and Tuanjie Town, it was found that there were large and small tailings ponds lurking around the mining area. From the satellite map, the exposed mountain near the mining area is dark gray, and one or several white areas can always be found, with blue or red edges, standing abruptly in the mountains like scars. These white areas are tailings ponds, whose function is to store waste after mineral processing. Tailings waste usually contains some heavy metal elements, lime used in mineral processing and various chemicals.
According to the data of official website of Huayuan County Government, in 2009, there were 98 tailings ponds in this county, including 4 in the state of "dangerous reservoirs", 0/4 in "dangerous reservoirs" and 0/3 in "dangerous reservoirs". More than a quarter of tailings ponds have no flood discharge and seepage discharge measures or fail to meet the standards. By 20 1 1, there were 89 tailings ponds in this county.
The number of tailings ponds is in dynamic change. Li Jianjun of Flametu Village said that some tailings ponds around the village have been stopped for many years, but they have not been restored; Some closed warehouses were covered with soil less than one meter thick and then reused for farming. Some closed warehouses reopened after a period of time. The easiest to distinguish are those in use, which are constantly importing tailings and expanding the storage body, and the tailings water floats on the surface.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ tailings pond in use
Li Jianjun used to work in a mine near the village. In his view, the mining industry is "deep in water", and mines change hands back and forth between bosses, and "eating and eating" happens from time to time. Some bosses have mines without reservoirs, so they can only borrow reservoirs to discharge them. So the wastewater from some tailings ponds comes from several companies.
Once in the border town of Huozitu village, it was found that the largest tailings pond nearby was close to the top of the mountain, and the trees on one side of the mountain were submerged in it, and no protective measures could be seen inside the mountain. According to a worker at the scene, this tailings pond belongs to Haifeng Company and has been used for more than ten years, with a stacking depth of more than 80 meters.
This giant tailings pond, like a dammed lake, is at risk of dam break and leakage. From the safety point of view, they are man-made debris flow disasters with high potential energy, lying in the mountains like untimely bombs.
In September, 2008, a tailings dam-break accident occurred in Xiangfen, Shanxi, causing 277 deaths, 4 missing and 33 injured. On 20 10, a dam-break accident occurred in Huayuan county, killing 6 people. After that, the local government strengthened the management of tailings ponds and established the responsibility system of supervision and flood control. County leaders were responsible for key tailings ponds one by one.
According to Chen Nengchang's analysis, if the tailings pond is poorly managed, risks such as leakage, collapse and debris flow may occur. If the construction and maintenance are carried out in full accordance with the standards, the risk of related geological disasters will be much smaller.
Behind the tailings pond is the mining industry that has created great economic benefits, and their existence has also changed the life track of the surrounding villagers.
At the entrance of Flame Map Village, there is a picture of the relocation plan on the wall. The population of the whole village is expected to move out on 20 18, but the villagers are not sure when to move out. Li Jianjun understands that their village is located in the mined-out area, so they can't move. However, he noticed that there was no word related to mines in the plan, which was marked as "ex situ poverty alleviation and relocation project".
The relocation effect map is facing a road. When trucks carrying lead and zinc powder passed by, the villagers stopped here and asked the drivers to charge the "soil erosion fee" for each train according to 250 yuan.
"Don't stop the mine car, only stop the car that transports the product (lead zinc powder)." Li Jianjun didn't explain the reason, only that the boss of the mining enterprise ordered the driver to pay the fee. After all, how many stops are not a fixed number. Villagers participate voluntarily, with a maximum of more than 40 people, and the cost of a car is no more than 10 yuan.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ Border Town, a tailings pond in Yantu Village.
Falling lead and zinc powder
On the way from longtan town to Huayuan County, there was an endless stream of vehicles transporting mineral powder. Black and gray stains often remain on the back door of the truck, and the sunshade net tightly covers the carriage. They drove out of the concentrator and dripped all the way to the processing factory on the outskirts of the county.
Wang Gui, a villager in Dongli Village, is wary of the black and silver gray on the road. The distinction between the two is simple: the black one is lead and the silver-gray one is zinc. There are five mining areas around their village, which belong to three companies, such as Taifeng Mining, and dozens of cars transport zinc powder and lead powder from here every day.
Wang Gui's home is on the side of the road. During the day, there are trucks passing by. He used a plastic shed around the house, covered with dust. Black and gray liquids can be clearly seen on the cement pavement in front of the door. When the quantity is small, they gather in a pool, and when the quantity is large, they will flow downwards along the terrain.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ Dongli Village, the roadside is a paddy field, and the dust floating when the transport vehicle passes by falls on the plants.
Previously, Wang Gui was a small mine owner, but after the mine price fell and the industry was integrated, he went bankrupt and changed his career.
Wang Gui, who is familiar with the inside story of the mining industry, pointed to the dust on the ground and told him that once the dust came from a concentrator not far away, it would be transported to a factory in the suburbs for further processing. Even for primary products, the purity of these lead powders and zinc powders is above 50%. He firmly believes that this is the reason why his grandson's blood lead exceeds the standard. "Children are playing on the road, and such a high concentration of lead powder is inhaled. How can it not exceed the standard? "
A video shot by Wang Gui showed that the transport vehicle from Dongli Village leaked all the way, and the ground was covered with black stains. I once consulted a senior person in the lead-zinc mine industry. He said: From the video, there was a stream of water flowing out during transportation, indicating that the concentrator adopted the dewatering method of sedimentation tank, and the visual water content was between 20% and 25%. However, the water content of the mineral powder filtered by the filter will be controlled below 15%, and the water will not be squeezed out during transportation.
The above-mentioned senior people said that there is no clear standard in this respect in China at present, and the standards in the industry generally require that the moisture content be controlled below 20%. Some small-scale enterprises may not buy filtration equipment, and directly adopt this method of manually adding sedimentation tanks.
I have visited many mining areas in Maoer Township, longtan town and Tuanjie Town, and found that the mineral powder transport vehicle leaked during driving. There are many rice fields beside the road, and many plants along the road are covered with gray dust.
Problems left over from mining in Xiangxi: In addition to the border town, there are children with lead poisoning here.
△ Dongli Village collectively bought sprinklers to reduce dust.
Despite living in a polluted environment for a long time, none of the adults in Dongli village have been examined for blood lead. The villagers interviewed all said: "No matter adults, emphasize children first."
According to the data, in recent years, there have been many incidents of children's blood lead exceeding the standard and cadmium rice, mostly because of the industrial pollution source and soil environment in their place of residence. In September this year, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Agriculture jointly issued the Measures for the Management of Agricultural Land Soil Environment (for Trial Implementation), which came into effect on June 5438+065438+ 10/day.
165438+1On October 27th, the responsible persons of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Agriculture emphasized that the prevention and control of soil pollution would be an important part of environmental law enforcement. Relevant departments will strengthen law enforcement and supervision, focus on non-ferrous metal mining and other industries, strictly implement emission standards for heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lead and chromium, implement relevant total control indicators, and cut off the chain of pollutants entering farmland.