Most ordinary folks pan for gold in most river banks reaching up to inaccessible parts of rivers and up to the river source. In this city, there are gold panners in big rivers like in the barangays of Bunguiao, Curuan, Vitali and an undetermined number of rivers beyond the reach of ordinary folks.
Gold panners -- men, women, children and old folks -- simply use wooden pans to retrieve gold from river sand. Some also put up improvised sluice boxes with gates or chutes to filter gold bits from sand.
Enterprising miners also dig tunnels near river banks which sometimes collapse during rains and trap miners in these rabbit holes underground.
Entrepreneurs in the hills also put up so-called “ball mills” to grind ore and extract the gold using mercury and other toxic chemicals -- resulting to pollution of river water which flows to irrigation field downstream.
No comments:
Post a Comment