CoP tackles illegal quarrying

IT shouldn’t have taken a Sunday Newsday report on June 29 for the police to tackle the pollution of the Guanapo River by illegal quarrying, but the response by the new Commissioner of Police was brisk and appropriate.

After confirming the information, CoP Allister Guevarro visited the illegal quarry in Manuel Congo on “a targeted operation” on July 2. The unlicensed operator was alleged to have been quarrying five hectares of state land and was doing so for years.

Despite significant pollution of the river, this activity managed to elude the notice of the Ministry of Energy, the Environmental Management Agency, the Forestry Division and even WASA, who dispatched a team to confirm the Sunday Newsday report.

This is what happened at that quarry. The operator was operating illegally without a permit. State lands were being indiscriminately ravaged without oversight. A watercourse was being casually polluted. This country’s national resources were being stolen casually and for years in plain sight.

WASA was aware of the quarrying and discharge into the river since March and knew the impact in time and money required to clean up the silted river. The boldness of this crime should come as no surprise to anyone, least of all those charged with putting a stop to it.

Former energy minister Stuart Young declared that illegal quarrying was high on his agenda in 2021.

Three men were arrested in November 2022 when they were caught in the act of removing aggregate with an excavator and two trucks at a protected leatherback turtle nesting site in Matura.

In March 2023, Snr Supt Kerwin Francis of the Multi-Agency Task Force acknowledged that fraud, bribery, and coercion were in play as part of illegal quarrying operations.

By then, the task force had seized 13 trucks, eight excavators and a bulldozer, charging 11 people in the five years since the formation of the unit.

That month, the Ministry of Energy told the Public Accounts Committee that it planned to use aerial surveillance to map legal and illegal quarry sites.

It remains a matter of some concern that the ministry cannot muster the technical resources to deploy widely available drones operating in alignment with existing cadastral mapping to survey remote locations, identify quarry sites and act on those findings.

A quarry is a large, messy space that might be hidden by surrounding vegetation at ground level but is blindingly obvious from above. Given the lethargy to deploy readily available technology in the service of addressing a criminal act that destroys the environment, plunders the state’s resources, and enriches thieves who can afford heavy equipment, the official response to illegal quarrying raises troubling questions.

TT has paid enough to clean up and rehabilitate these quarries; it’s time to invest more seriously in effective preventive action.