The Ok Tedi is a river in Papua New Guinea. The river was originally named the Alice River by the explorer Luigi d'Albertis, however it has come to be know as the Ok Tedi, Ok means river in language of the local people. At the rivers head waters is the Ok Tedi copper mine. The Ok Tedi is a tributary of the Fly River. Luigi dAlbertis (1841 - 1901) was an Itallian naturalist and explorer. ... General Name, Symbol, Number copper, Cu, 29 Chemical series transition metals Group, Period, Block 11 , 4, d Density, Hardness 8920 kg/m3, 3. ... A tributary (or affluent or confluent) is a contributory stream, a river that does not reach the sea, but joins another major river (a parent river), to which it contributes its waters, swelling its discharge. ... The Fly is the longest river of the island of New Guinea. ...

The Ok Tedi river is perhaps best known for its use by BHP (now BHP Billiton) to release toxic tailings from its copper and gold mine, resulting in vast destruction of wild-life and massive disruption to the lives of people living downstream.

The mine opened in the early 1980’s to exploit what was believed to be the largest deposit of copper (and a huge seam of gold above it) in the world, and the town of Tabubil (popul. 10,000) was created to service the mine’s staff.

For roughly a decade the mine’s owners – Australia’s BHP (majority) and the PNG government (20-30% over time) - dumped close to 30 million tons of mine tailings (left over metal and chemicals like copper sulphide and cyanide) and 40 million tons of fine rock into the river system each year.

The tailings caused widespread and diverse harms both environmentally and socially to the 50,000 people who live in the 120 villages downstream of the mine. The chemicals killed or contaminated the vast majority of the fish, which subsequently caused harm to all animal species that live in the area – that also caused a fairly obvious impact on indigenous people. The tons of sediment pumped into the river have changed the riverbed, causing a relatively deep and slow river to become shallower and develop rapids (pretty serious when the most common form of transport is canoe, which is now too dangerous for many women and children to navigate on their own). When the riverbed raised it caused flooding, which left a thick layer of tailings-filled mud on the flood plain. The mud smothered vegetation in an effect known as “dieback”. Dieback killed off the plantations of taro, bananas and sago palm that are the stables of the local diet. The impact was famously referred to as “ecocide”.

Although copper concentrations in the water are about 30 times above the standard level, that is still below the World Health Organisation (WHO) standards. For other meanings of the acronym WHO, see WHO (disambiguation) WHO flag Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Health Organization (WHO) is an agency of the United Nations, acting as a coordinating authority on international public health. ...

The reasons for this disaster are complex. Firstly the relatively new PNG government was weak, greedy and corrupt, and BHP simply didn’t care. The original plans included an Environmental Impact Statement (done by an Australian Consultancy) that called for a tailings dam to be built near the mine. This would allow heavy metals and solid particles to settle, before releasing the clean ‘high-water’ into the river system where remaining contaminants would be diluted. But the plan was seriously flawed and in 1984 an earthquake (common in the area) caused the half built dam to collapse. Afterwards the company continued operations without any dam, initially because BHP argued that it would too expensive to rebuild it, and then after the Panguna mine shut down a cash-strapped PNG government decided a dam wasn’t necessary.

But the seeds of conflict were sown before the mine even begun operations. Almost all of PNG’s land is held under a complex system of native title, with ownership divided amongst a huge number of small clans, while the central government retains control over how resources that lie under the ground are used.

The 2000 members of the clan that held ownership of the land on which the mine would be built were included in the formal negotiations. They got cash, jobs, infrastructure (schools, health care etc) but the indigenous communities who live downstream from the mine were not consulted, and received none of the benefits and all of the harms.

In the 1990s the communities of the lower Fly Region sued BHP and received US$28.6 million in an out-of-court settlement, which was the culmination of an enormous public-relations campaign against the company by green groups.

As part of the settlement a (limited) dredging operation was put in place and efforts were made to rehabilitate the site around the mine. However the mine is still in operation and waste continues to flow into the river system. BHP was granted legal indemnity from future mine related damages.

But the most significant change was that BHP (now BHP Billiton) abandoned its interest in the mine and turned over ownership to a trust established by the PNG government in 2001 – The Ok Tedi Development Foundation.

The Ok Tedi mine is scheduled to close in 2010, and until that time the profits are divided two ways – 66% go into a long-term fund to enable the mine to continue to contribute to the PNG economy for up to half a century after it closes. The remaining third is allocated to current development programs in the local area (Western Province) and PNG more generally. International experts are brought in to carve up the proceeds to local groups and NGO’s