Cape Town - Emerys, a French multinational company, which owns Annesley Andalusite mine in Limpopo province, needs to expand its mining operations and now wants to move 240 families at the Segorong village to Penge, a village heavily contaminated by asbestos waste.
The SA Human Rights Commission has already visited the area to investigate.
Emerys's move apparently has the support of the Limpopo department of local government and housing, which wants to establish a formal township.
But Steven Donohue, the principal specialist and acting head of the department of community health, has warned that a good analogy to the hazard people faced is to build a village on a pile of radioactive waste.
The township proposal hinged on a deeply flawed health risk assessment based on airborne fibre levels performed by a subcontractor with dubious qualifications, he said.
Five samples taken at Penge had asbestos in them and it was possible to find asbestos fibres or whole pieces of asbestos rock virtually anywhere in the village.
"Gross asbestos contamination is clearly not confined to the mine dumps. Penge is an ongoing environmental health disaster and should be deemed permanently uninhabitable,'' Donohue said.
Penge, the largest mine for amosite asbestos in the world between 1920 and 1992, was owned by Cape Asbestos, a subsidiary of Cape Plc, a British multinational company, and later by Gencor, a South African investment firm.
Donohue said that when the mine was closed in 1992, the buildings and houses were occupied by local people and families of former workers. Mine buildings were gradually stripped for building materials, and about 250 houses in and around the mine were occupied by about 3 000 people.
Asbestos dumps were not well rehabilitated and were thinly covered with soil. The dumps were either not fenced or the fence was stolen. They were planted with milk bush but were open to anyone to enter and were grazed by cattle and goats. Digging, gathering of firewood and erosion had exposed the dumps in many places.
"Asbestos waste is widespread around the village and is still detectable in water from the Olifants River, which flows past the mine," Donohue said.
Houses and infrastructure in Penge were generally in a poor condition and the main tar road was crumbling, exposing asbestos waste underneath. The surface had disintegrated from about 100m from the hospital.
All people should be gradually removed from Penge and buildings should be demolished or rendered uninhabitable. As an interim measure, the dumps should be fenced off and no human or domestic animal access should be allowed, Donohue said.
Zoliswa Mzinjelwa, the head of human resources for Emerys South Africa, said the mine had run out of reserves of andalusite and its mining licences permitted it to extend its mining operations to Segorong, which had to be relocated.
The community of 240 families were prepared to move to Burgersfort but not to Penge. The tribal authority did not want the community to move.
"From our side, we need the traditional authorities' permission, and without that resolution we can't mine,'' Mzinjelwa said.
Ross Rankapole, Limpopo's regional manager for mineral and energy affairs, could not be reached for comment.