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ANAM denies environmental permit for Rodman cement plant

by Eric Jackson, partly from other media

Parque Industrial Marítimo SA, PIMSA, seemed to the outsider to have everything wired for a cement clinker plant at the former Rodman Naval Station, just nortwest of the existing docks and adjacent to where a Singaporean company had obtained a concession to build new port facilities. In that position, they would have an advantage of fewer transportation costs to provide cement for the canal expansion project and over the long term, to get their product onto ships to be taken to markets around the world.

However, clinker plants are neither rocket science nor a technology that Panama has not seen before. Yes, emissions can be reduced by the installation of expensive stack scrubbers, but these sorts of facilities coat the surrounding area in a fine white caustic dust. On the Transistmica in Colon Province, we have seen what a plant without scrubbers does --- a large area in which the stunted trees have white leaves, houses and cars and people constantly covered in dust, doctors at public health care facilities treating and elevated number of respiratory diseases --- and a visibly improved but by no means perfect situation after, in the wake of years of complaints, pollution control equipment was installed. It may not be a lead foundry or an open-pit uranium mine, but a cement plant, especially one that creates or powders clinker --- the vitrified cinder residue of burning coal, usually with various sorts of rock --- is an inherently dirty industry.

PIMSA proposed to merely mill clinker rather than to do the burning that creates it. But even then, to control the dust a plant must be enclosed and have a powerful and expensive ventilation system that cycles the air through a stack in which mist is sprayed to wash the powder out of the air. Even then, some pollution escapes.

And is swabbing the decks the stereotypical sad lot of sailors everywhere? With a clinker plant as a neighbor, there would be a lot more of that in Panama coast guard, the Servicio Maritimo Nacional --- and maybe some more frequent sick leaves and early retirement for silicosis.

The SMN has quasi-military discipline of the sort that just led to a lieutenant's conviction for homicide in the case of a marine who dropped death from punitive exercises ordered for his failure in a training course abroad. The public heard no complaints directly from the closest neighbors, whose home piers would have been most affected. Nor did the workers at Panama Ports, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, which has more authoritarian than the Panamanian norm corporate culture and runs the Port of Balboa directly across the canal entrance from the new plant, go before TV cameras or to newspaper reporters to complain.

But tourist-oriented businesses that in dry season are downwind from the proposed plant side sure did complain, as did the promoters of the Museum of Biodiversity project, which will create Panama City's most defining landmark in the form of an eccentric Frank Gehry building.

Ah, but what's a little coat of dust at the height of tourism season? PIMSA assured the public that its emissions would be well within the limits set in international health standards. "It's non-polluting," PIMSA director Luis H. Moreno III told La Prensa. "It's totally false that the plant is going to create a dust cloud that affects visibility in the Panama Canal or the Frank Gehry Museum."

However, the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) took a look at PIMSA's environmental impact study, found it grossly deficient by several different technical measures, and withheld the required permit. The authority announced in several of the mainstream media that PIMSA might well build its clinker milling plant in Panama, but it won't be allowed to do so at Rodman.

A cement factory somewhere else would put PIMSA in the same shoes as every other cement plant in Panama --- actually, at a disadvantage considering the economies of scale that multinational giant CEMEX, which operates here, can bring to bear. That will not do in Panama's monopolistic business culture, where the name of the game is to influence the government to grant special competitive advantages.

So PIMSA is appealing the ANAM decision, first by asking for a reconsideration and possibly by taking it to the courts if that's denied. It's also running large ads in the daily newspapers, reprinting a version of La Prensa's front page map that indicated an affected area encompassing Amador and a national park (Cerro Ancon) and an even closer protected wildlife area (Cerro San Juan) and extending all the way to the Casco Viejo and calling it a lie. But ANAM director Ligia Castro de Doens calls the company's claims "incongruent."

One can never predict with certainty what the Panamanian courts will do and how quickly they'll do it --- cynics will claim that these tend to be functions of the size of the bribe --- but it does seem likely that PIMSA would have to engage in protracted litigation that could take years before it could even start on a cement plant at Rodman, and by that time the windows of opportunity for the choice canal construction contracts will have opened and shut. So barring a quick reversal, look for the PIMSA proposal to go away and never come back.

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