Moscow Engineering Firm Lends Expertise to Africa

10/5/2010
by Anne Wallace Allen
Idaho Business Review

After almost 30 years of cleaning up lead contamination at the Bunker Hill Superfund site in Idaho’s Silver Valley mining district, TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering Inc., is testing its expertise in the developing world.

The 100-person company, which started in a Moscow home office in 1984, has expanded its reach to projects in Senegal, Russia, China and the Dominican Republic. This year, it is sending engineers to a high-profile lead contamination disaster in a gold mining district of northwestern Nigeria.

The work doesn’t pay well. TerraGraphics spent about $75,000 on the spring and summer trips to clean up two Nigerian villages. With payments from the United Nations, the company will probably break even cleaning up five more this fall, said President Jerry Lee.

“We’re actually trying to figure out a business model that won’t put us out of business,” Lee said.

Nigeria’s lead poisoning disaster unfolded after rising gold prices led villages to mine gold by hand, often using cooking implements from their homes. As the villagers crushed ore to retrieve the gold, they also released lead-containing dust. Children, who are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, inhaled the dust, and it also leached into wells and into the soil. The ore in the area has unusually high concentrations of lead.

Because of the gold mining, Nigeria has suffered more deaths from lead poisoning from mining and lead processing than the whole world has seen in the last 40 years, said Ian von Lindern, a TerraGraphics co-founder who is working in Nigeria. In one village, 43 percent of the children under age 5 died in a three-month period earlier this year.

“These children were frothing at the mouth, convulsing,” Lee said. “There were actually times where the child died on the way to the hospital.”

The international nonprofit Doctors Without Borders has established a clinic in the area to treat the lead poisoning. Meanwhile the Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based nonprofit organization that cleans up pollution in the developing world, hired TerraGraphics to design the cleanup and oversee its implementation by local government and health officials.

The TerraGraphics’ approach is unique because the company trains locals to clean up contaminated sites instead of bringing in workers from outside. TerraGraphics appears to be the only firm doing lead cleanup work in this manner, said Richard Fuller, the president of Blacksmith.

“We can do it less expensively using as much local labor as possible,” said engineer Derek Forseth. “It wasn’t about going in and doing the project and leaving; it was about going in and working with some of the local managers and training them on running the crews and disposing of the soil and the whole process.”

Terragraphics’ international work grew out of a venture with the University of Idaho about four years ago. Von Lindern had been looking for a way to help graduate students practice what they had learned. An early project was at a battery recycling facility in Senegal, where workers cracked open batteries with sledgehammers and drained out the acid. The extracted lead was melted into chunks to be sold to recyclers. TerraGraphics worked at a similar plant in the Dominican Republic.

For the Nigeria project, TerraGraphics has sent about 10 environmental engineers, chemists, geologists, and environmental scientists from its own firm and from other Idaho firms. All are experts who volunteered to travel. Along with a group of U of I graduate students, they are training local engineers and workers to map the contaminated sites in the villages and remove the polluted dirt to landfills.

They’re also trying to teach local residents how to avoid recontaminating the villages as they continue mining. Ending the gold mining isn’t an option. There is farming in the area, but locals can make four times as much money right now mining gold.

“If we had said we had to close the gold mining, we would never have been successful at getting the cleanup started,” Lee said.

Some of the TerraGraphics staff will end up having spent three months in Nigeria. It’s not a vacation. Lee related how one engineer killed a rat with a boot in the middle of the night.

“It’s 110 degrees in the daytime and 90 degrees at night and there’s very little running water and electricity,” he said.

Leaders at TerraGraphics hope to have all the villages decontaminated by the end of this year. Back in Idaho, Lee and others are trying to figure out a way to keep supporting both sides of their business – the for-profit domestic work and the nonprofit international work. The EPA recently estimated there is another 50 to 100 years of cleanup work left at the Bunker Hill site.

“It’s for a great cause,” said Forseth, who hopes to make his second trip to Nigeria in October. “We could really help.”

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