A once-forested valley sits silently as a graveyard. The scars left by heavy machinery on the swaths of forest are still evident, with chunks of coal waste littering the ground.
Once seething like a beehive, the now abandoned Onyeama Coal Mine in the south-eastern Nigerian city of Enugu, has become a shadow of itself. The coal mine is one of Nigeria’s derelict coal fields which was closed in 2002 when the Nigerian Coal Corporation went bankrupt. Now the area is mostly farmland.Sunday Okeke, a farmer, walks along one of the narrow paths into the mine looking very upset.
Reclamation includes filling depressions or hollows with soil or rock removed during excavation and planting trees to stabilize and restore the mined area. Best practices also include repairing wildlife habitats; removing office buildings, processing facilities, and transportation equipment; and sealing mine shafts and other openings.Okpara Mine, there is a complete collapse of mining infrastructure years after mining activities had taken place.
“I had to restart my live from scratch. I started firewood business, but the income is not sufficient to take care of my family needs,” Ude says with a tingeSince the Onyeama, Iva Valley, Ribadu, Okpara and Ogbete Mines were abandoned, locals have had to contend with varying degrees of environmental and physical hazards.
Dr. Onwubere Basden Jones, a medical expert specialized in cardiovascular and congestive heart diseases, says that elderly people in mining communities are likely to have co-morbidities associated with mining. In particular, the network of underground mining tunnels in Enugu is poorly mapped so no one knows their full extent or how it may be exacerbating flooding and erosion issues. Thehave reported that the area is at risk of cave-ins. “Sometimes in the city, you will notice a lot of earth movements and the land will collapse inward. This shows that that place is empty below,” says Nwafor.
“I am not aware. There is no official complaint from these communities to my office. “The state government cannot be blamed, as the mining sector is under the federal government. They should be the one to put things in order.” However, this activity is poorly regulated by the government. Most of these miners operate outside the formal regulatory regime, without licenses or permits. As a result, communities suffer from environmental degradation and negative health consequences. These mines sites are rarely properly closed or remediated, creating hazards for communities long after miners have moved on., the landscape is punctuated with pockets of abandoned mining pits.
The couple suspected heavy metal poisoning as the cause of their child’s sickness. Ihotor-Ameka has huge deposits of minerals, notably lead and zinc, and is littered with mining pits from both abandoned and active artisanal and small-scale mines.
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