Richard Ness : Blog : Buyat Bay is Clean!!!

Buyat Bay is Clean!!! - 14 Aug 2006
by Eric

While re-sampling has confirmed that Buyat Bay is clean, it has also confirmed who is really dirty. Yes I am talking about the Police results and the Technical Team’s report. The question now is what more is needed to complete the final rites for the Technical Team report’s official burial.

On 28-Jul-2006 the Judges approved the resampling of Buyat Bay by Australian Laboratory Services (ALS), an internationally accredited environmental laboratory in Indonesia. Next day ALS visited Buyat Bay and took samples from four locations that matched with the locations where the Police had sampled two years earlier. From each location three samples were collected from the surface, middle and bottom parts of the bay. The sampling procedure and the storage of samples were observed by reporters from several dailies.

On 11-August-2006, ALS presented the results to the court and explained the quality control procedures observed during the testing process. According to ALS all the 14 samples, including the two duplicates from Buyat Bay showed that dissolved mercury was not detected in these samples, and the average for dissolved arsenic was 1.33 ppb which is well below the national standard of 12 ppb. The range for dissolved arsenic was from 0.9-1.8 ppb, which is the same as the range observed during the mining operation and the post closure period.

The resampling results are also the same as the results sampled by the Ministry of Environment in 2003 and 2004, and they also match the results of the independent sampling by the World Health Organization (WHO), CSIRO-Australia, and University of Sam Ratulangi (UNSRAT) in Manado.

Further, the comparison of the seawater quality of Buyat Bay with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the coastal water of the US, UK and Japan also shows that the average level of arsenic in Buyat Bay is lower than these international water bodies.

Right from the start when the Police laboratory found that there was mercury pollution in Buyat Bay on 28 July 2004, the results looked suspicious and undoubtedly wrong. According to my Dad, eight years of continual quarterly monitoring had shown that dissolved mercury was undetectable in Buyat Bay. Moreover when the WHO tested the seawater two weeks after the Police had sampled, they found that the mercury level was well below the detection limit of the most advanced laboratory instruments currently available in Indonesian. Within a period of two weeks it was impossible that the Police results would be higher than the WHO’s result by more than 5,000,000%. After all mercury pollution is not like a switch that can be turned on or off at will.

According to the USEPA and the Canadian Environmental Ministry mercury pollution is persistent and irreversible once it enters the environment, and when an ecosystem gets polluted with mercury, it could take several decades to restore the mercury level back to its natural levels. No wonder it took nearly twenty five years before Minamata Bay was declared clean on 29 July, 1997.

Therefore, when the prosecutors and some NGOs resisted the decision to resample Buyat Bay by using the argument that the conditions in Buyat Bay has changed, their argument was rejected as technically wrong. The fact is simple--NGOs knew that they had lied in the first place and the resampling would further expose their political motives.

As I have mentioned in my earlier blogs, my father is going through this ordeal for a crime that never happened. What is outrageous is that no one is holding the individuals from the regulatory agencies and NGOs accountable for their willful manipulation of facts, and the high cost they have imposed on the government, the community of Buyat Bay and the general public. You can only imagine the extent of personal pain this has caused. But most tragic is losing Baby Andini, whose life could have been saved if she had not been paraded around as a poster child by irresponsible people, but had received proper medical treatment.

What is also worrisome is that this kind of blatant lying could so easily penetrate the governance architecture of Indonesia. The Buyat Bay controversy has caused immense damage to the nation because as the truth has steadily come out during the trial, the public trust in NGOs and regulators has also eroded at an equally steady rate. Such revelations are a matter of considerable concern because the legitimacy of regulators and NGOs in the eyes of the public is a necessary pre-condition for good governance in any country.

It is clear that the laboratory results of resampling are not only a strong evidence of how clean Buyat Bay is, but it is also a metaphor for how a few individuals from the government and puppet NGOs can corrode the credibility of institutions and cause the governance system to fail. (read an independent analysis of how WALHI and JATAM are undermining the fledgling democracy in Indonesia)

And finally here is a question for the readers to ponder over. Jane Perlez of the New York Times has been surreptitiously absent from the scene, and has not picked up and published the truth yet. Is she sleeping in Jakarta, or does she suffer from the problem of selective hearing.