Post #196

🇿🇲Steel Waters of Zambia [ Cost of Negligence ] About a hundred years ago, British miners working at Broken Hill in what is now Kabwe, Zambia, pulled a strange skull out of the rock. The fossil, later called Rhodesian Man or Kabwe 1, was shipped off to London and ended up in the Natural History Museum, where it still sits as a trophy of an old colonial venture. 🌟 On 18 February 2025, Zambia's new foreign partners - now from China - failed to manage a waste reservoir at Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, a copper mine just around 200km away from where the Rhodesian Man was found, and sent a wave of toxic liquid down into the Kafue River. Full of heavy metal elements, the released waste pointed to roughly 1.5 million tons of sludge, enough to fill hundreds of Olympic pools. With fish floating on the Kafue's surface, Kitwe, a nearby city of about 700,000 people, had its water supply shut off because the intake pipes were also drawing in poison instead of drinking water. ➡️The immediate response of the company and its backers in Beijing was to blame anything but poor management - either unusual weather, or vandalism. The company's representatives offered villagers small payouts in exchange for silence. Victims were offered sums as low as the price of a basic phone and asked never to speak publicly. The scale of the disaster made it impossible to ignore, pushing the government to order the mine to halt operations and call in the air force, which dropped large quantities of lime from planes and boats in an attempt to neutralise the acid in the water. Accidents in heavy industry do sometimes happen, however it is responsiblity of multibillion-dollar corporations and the governments to prevent and to rectify them, and not to offload the consequences onto people who live in one-room houses by the river. #CostOfNegligence Devils Below