When the police investigate the waste brought up from the illegal dump of the Orivesi mine, even small details, such as old coffee packets, are valuable material.
Orivesi
A truck rumbling up from the mine like the black hole of Mordor. A hundred meters away, the car dumps its cargo onto a fenced field. The cargo forms a pile next to dozens of similar-looking piles.
The police detectives, dressed in rubber overalls, masks and goggles, move next to the fresh pile and start crunching, rummaging and scrutinizing the place.
An estimated 500 loads of waste are brought from the country’s sewers.
One of the policemen digs out some spray paint. The garbage pile gets the pink number 58 on its side.
It means that it is the 58th truckload of waste that has been brought out of the illegal waste pit of the Orivesi gold mine. Emptying the hole started on Tuesday.
On Friday in the afternoon, representatives of the media have been invited to the environmental crime scene of the Orivesi gold mine to follow the emptying of the mine’s waste shaft.
The head of the criminal investigation, the crime commissioner, is receiving the media Joni Länspuro.
He says that the operation is extraordinary both for the police and for the contractor carrying out the clearing of the corridor, the construction company YIT.
Investigation director Joni Länsipuro in the area of the Orivesi mine.
The latter has not been connected to the operation of the mine or worked for the mine as a contractor, but YIT has been selected for the task after an independent tender.
“There is a really, really challenging operation going on,” Länsipuro states.
The difficulty is indicated by the fact that the viewing intended for the media was almost canceled, because the emptying had stalled for a while on Thursday. The waste simply could not be removed from the mine corridor, because the material was jammed there so tightly.
“The removal of the material is made difficult, for example, by stone slabs collapsing on top of the waste in the corridor inside. Then the rock has to be blown up.”
Mining is a good kilometer deep at its deepest point. The waste is located at a depth of approximately 65–88 meters in a cone-shaped shaft.
The load number 55 has included, for example, a Juhla-Mokka wrap and a guidance cape.
The corridors of the mine, which has been closed for years, are dangerous. For safety reasons, only truck drivers can go near the waste. Excavating the waste from the shaft is done by remote control.
At the upper end of the tunnel, a chipper is working, handling a bucket loader that fills truck pallets with waste. Only two trucks and one chipper work in the area at a time.
The speed of work progress varies.
The police examines the waste lifted from the mine shaft and looks for, for example, coffee packet-type waste, on the basis of which the waste can be scheduled.
During the first two days, the trucks came and went from the tunnel in a frenzy. Sometimes the work stops because of the challenges associated with removing the waste.
Only starting the emptying required extensive preparations. The contractor first had to excavate a 150-meter-long separate passage underground in order to be able to do the work at all.
According to estimates, a total of around 500 truck pallets of waste rise to the surface of the earth from the corridor. One pallet holds about 25 tons of goods. Based on this, you can calculate the size category of the amount of waste containing an illegal landfill.
According to Länsipuro, this is also just a rough estimate, the accuracy of which is too early to bet on.
“We have prior knowledge of what has been pushed into the abyss over the course of thirty years, but the truth will only be revealed when the work is done.”
“Everything that is there is brought up.”
By rule of thumb the first fifty piles of waste include, among other things, plastic pipes, tarps, metal and plastic containers, wooden boxes and huge amounts of soil.
Not all product material out of the corridor is of equal value from the point of view of criminal investigation and also when assessing environmental harm. Länsipuro says that even more than 90 percent of the material is soil.
Waste has been brought underground since Tuesday.
“When oil has spilled into the soil, the soil has become waste. That’s why the police first take an environmental sample from each pile.”
After the police have taken their own samples for evaluation, the substance continues its journey to the forensic laboratory for more detailed examination. After that, Pirkanmaa ely will take over the piles on the mine yard.
Among the waste, the police are especially interested in product packaging, such as coffee packets.
“From the dates on them, we can deduce when unrelated waste was thrown into the mine corridor. This will later help us allocate responsibilities to the right parties.”
And when you squint, that’s where it splits, among the soil, sand, gravel and plastic scrap: a genuine Kulta-Mokka package.
#Orivesi #failed #gold #left #disaster #kind #looting #bowels #earth #beginning #revealed
