WHEIN TOWN, MOUNT BARCLAY – Wede Julius Morris, a mother of eight, says she had no idea that the government of Liberia would build the largest solid waste disposal site in the country close to her home when she moved to Whein Town in 2001. She says she bought the land in 1986 in a place full of promise. Now she lives among rats, roaches and flies. She says her family gets sick often and they must live with the stench of a mountain of garbage every day.
Report by Mae Azango, New Narratives Correspondent
“That well you see over there is where my children and I drink from, because we cannot afford to buy mineral water,” she says, pointing to a borehole on the side of her makeshift house. “We get sick from it, but what can we do?”
Morris and many other residents of Whein Town, a community of about 10,000 people in Paynesville outside of Monrovia, say they are negatively affected by the garbage site. The youth here recently petitioned the legislature in Monrovia to close the dump, managed by the Monrovia City Corporation (MCC). The 25-acre landfill was created in 2005 following the closure of the previous solid waste disposal site in Fiamah that year.
Monrovia produces an estimated 800 tons of domestic solid waste each day, and 45 percent is covered by the formal solid waste collection system, according to the World Bank in a report released in June earlier this year. The bank helped establish the facility, which is now over its capacity because of the sheer volume of trash. The facility will close in two years and will be replaced by a new landfill in Cheesemanburg, according to the bank.
The death rate in Whein Town has increased over the last five years, residents say. Saah Vannie, Whein Town youth chairman, claims he recorded the deaths of three people in October this year alone, including a homeless man who scavenged through the dump.
There are no official figures to back Vannie’s claims, but malaria cases are on the the rise in the community, according to the Whein Town Community Clinic. Dumpsites are a breeding ground for mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, environmentalists say.
“People have been dying abruptly of unknown sicknesses,” Vannie discloses.
“We do not know what kind of sickness killed those people because [of] lack of clinics here,” points out Morris. “Look, the rotten water from the garbage [is] passing all under our houses, which has finished contaminating all of our drinking water.”
Monrovia Mayor Jefferson Koijee blames his predecessor for choosing the wrong location for a solid waste site, which has exposed the inhabitants to environmental threats.
“Once you have a landfill in the center of the very town where people are close to the garbage, you will have a lot of environmental consequences,” Koijee tells FrontPage Africa in an interview. “If I were mayor at the time and was in decision-making, I do not think I would have selected the current place as an option for a suitable landfill. We are in empathy with the Whein Town community and understand that issues raised by them are all legitimate. We work with them in addressing those concerns they are raising by sharing mosquito nets and erecting water kiosks until we have a successful closure.”
Former Acting Monrovia Mayor Mary Broh, who headed the MCC at the time the garbage disposal facility was built, refused to comment on Mayor Koijee’s assertions.
MCC should have taken into consideration the impacts of the garbage facility on Whein Town before building the site, says Dr. Emmanuel Urey, an environmentalist with One Life Liberia, a land rights and environmental advocacy firm. The government of Liberia should have avoided the Whein Town situation by putting into place strict environmental safeguards for different types of waste, he adds.
“Waste is difficult to deal with, and if we are not careful, an entire population could be wiped out,” explains Dr. Urey. “The most dangerous waste is the medical waste. The reason is because it has many radioactive materials, which cause sickness, including skin burns. And when it enters into [the] water source, it affects people, mostly women of child-bearing age. Even if you are not drinking the water, but you are eating fish from the contaminated creek or river, it affects you through the fish.”
Waste dissolves into the soil and is washed into the underground water and other water bodies, which then make their way to people, according to Dr. Urey. Measures must be implemented to minimize dangers.
“There should be a method of separating medical wastes from solid wastes. You cannot dump medical waste to the same site as solid waste because it is very radioactive and should not be dumped at the same location,” he says. “Radioactive wastes are byproducts from different types of chemicals used in certain procedures, like X-ray and other equipment in hospitals. With regular awareness of how water and airborne diseases are spread from person to person, like in the case of Ebola, the population would be educated to avoid diseases.”
Executive Director Nathaniel Blama of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agrees with Dr. Urey, saying that the dumpsite has outlived its usefulness and should be dissolved.
“In the case of Whein Town and what went wrong was that, first of all, the landscape was not conducive because it was not prepared well,” Blama tells FrontPage Africa. “Water was seeping through the soil and contaminating the drinking sources, but people had already started dumping there before they went in to fix it.”
Blama says the mistakes made here will not be repeated in the Cheesemanburg landfill to be built.
“What we are trying to do in Cheesemanburg for the solid program to be better is to follow all of the steps so that we do not have the structure we now have in Whein Town,” he says. He notes that the government sidestepped some environmental procedures in response to an “emergency” after the previous garbage facility in Fiamah was destroyed.
Responding to Mayor Koijee’s statement on solid wastes being in the middle of the community, Blama claims that there were no houses in the area when the garbage facility was built. He further claims residents like Morris and Vannie encroached on the land.
“The full land space acquired by government was 25 acres, but because all the land space was not used by the government at the time, people just moved in and encroached on the remaining land,” Blama claims. “Now the same people are complaining of garbage smell.”
Residents of Whein Town will smell the stench of the huge pile of garbage until 2021, if the Cheesemanburg project is completed on schedule. That is a long time to wait for people like Morris.
“This rotten dumpsite they (authorities) brought here is killing us day and night; I can say we are already dead,” she says. “Let them take their damn dump pile anywhere they can carry it; we do not want it here.”
This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of a Land Rights and Climate Change Reporting Project. Funding is provided by the American World Jewish Service. The funder had no say in the story’s content.
