The boldest theft

It’s astonishing that illegal quarrying, a crime that requires heavy machinery and multi-tonne trucks, continues so casually in TT.

In March 2023, the Ministry of Energy told Parliament that it relied on Google Earth to monitor quarrying. The last formal aerial survey of the TT landscape to identify quarry sites was in 2014.

This isn’t 1846, when quarrying began on the San Fernando Hill. The mining of the hill, a mix of official, sanctioned quarrying and brazenly illegal acquisition of material, continued until the 1990s when the city’s mayor, Hazel Rogers-Dick, banned further quarrying at the site. The hill, a forested half-dome of argillite with challenging steps carved into it, was ground down by a third and stripped of forest cover. Its most distinctive feature today is a pillar of rock at its peak; a middle-finger reminder of the destruction so casually wrought on it.

There is no clear, committed national security agency continuously dedicated to monitoring, investigating, and prosecuting these public acts of criminal destruction.

The police once had an illegal quarrying unit, but that work now falls to the Multi-Agency Task Force, which seems to be a responder, not an investigator of this criminal activity.

Illegal mining sites spew waste materials without concern. People who are stealing aggregate don’t work with licenses, don’t require certificates of environmental clearance (CEC), and certainly don’t care about their impact on the environment. Even businesses with licences to operate don’t seem to fret much about CECs.

Trillions Systems halted operations a week ago after it was pointed out to them that their mining operation in Matura would affect a protected rainforest and a leatherback turtle nesting site.

That would have been clear if they had bothered to get the CEC required before starting excavation. To their credit, Trillions stopped mining and moved on to other projects. Presumably, CECs are in place for those.

Former planning minister Camille Robinson-Regis promised action in 2018 by the Environmental Management Agency’s (EMA) police unit. In 2021, the energy minister described the practice as gangsterism and promised to use the ministry’s intelligence to tackle the problem.

Six months later, former acting CoP Mc Donald Jacob promised an increased Multi-Agency Task Force crackdown. Yet, the standard set for licensing operators remains appallingly lax.

Operators are comfortable skirting requirements and ignoring regulations. Fines more than doubled in 2014 but haven’t deterred criminals with backhoes and excavators.

TT isn’t so big that a dedicated team, operating using geographic grids with drones, can’t police this problem to find and act on these industrial crimes. There’s clearly enough money in this business to operate in defiance of hefty fines, but not enough seriousness about monitoring, policing and enforcing the laws governing a crime that costs money and destroys our environment, if it isn’t managed to responsible standards.

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