Chiatura – Zone of a Disaster [Investigation], 2 June 2023

Danger to life

30-year-old Giorgi Ghughunishvili was returning home when he fell into a water-filled ditch and drowned. The trenches dug along each side of the road leading to residential homes in the village of Darkveti are the work of Georgian Manganese. After extracting manganese from underground, the site is simply abandoned and remains dug up for years, or for good. 3 years on from Giorgi’s death, the area still poses a danger to life...

Village Darkveti of the Chiatura municipality is no exception. Not even ambulances can reach Khalipauri districts due to the road being destroyed by open quarries...

To study the impact of the 17-year mining by Georgian Manganese on people and their lives, Mountain Stories conducted 15 expeditions to 15 villages of Chiatura. Not a single settlement or person remains in the municipality who has not been affected by the production...

That is why there are subsoil mining regulations, which stipulate that humans should not be directly exposed to open quarries, the washed-down soil should not end up in people’s gardens, the dust should not be allowed to be dispersed by the wind, and the site must be isolated from human settlements as much as possible,” according to environmental protection expert, Nino Gujaraidze’s assessment, these rules are completely disregarded in Chiatura...

Critically Polluted River

Among the 14 conditions set for the special manager was to protect the Kvirila River from pollution. You can tell how this promise was fulfilled with the naked eye.

“We haven’t been able to discern clear water in Kvirila even for an hour in recent years,” says Mikheil Imedadze, head of Chiatura fishing club.

None of the Georgian Manganese factories have a functioning purification plant. All sewage tanks are out of order. The river is yellowish before it reaches the treatment plants and turns pitch black after the manganese waste is poured in...

In the samples taken from Kvirila in the city of Chiatura, manganese exceeds the permissible concentration 42 times; 147 times near the city of Zestaponi; 3857 times in the river Bogiristskali, the right tributary of Kvirila; and 647 times in the so-called Tsofi section. Lead concentration is 8-12, nickel - 41, cobalt - 12, and zinc - 1361 times higher...

Government Concealing Files

The National Environmental Agency has been evaluating air quality in Georgia since 2018. Along with the Constitution of Georgia, the Aarhus Convention also obliges the transparency of the Agency's research results. Despite this, the state agencies refused to provide us with data on the air quality in Chiatura. The reason they gave was that these materials are part of a criminal case. Several cases have indeed been initiated in the prosecutor's office on the instances of atmospheric air pollution by the activities of Georgian Manganese, but none of them have been investigated so far. Mountain Stories has already appealed to the court for obtaining air quality data.

One of the documents unofficially obtained by us from the Ministry of Environmental Protection reveals that the dust content in the air caused by the activities of Georgian Manganese in Chiatura exceeds the acceptable concentration, which causes atmospheric pollution.

Itkhvisi – Village Being Swallowed by the Earth

People of the Chiatura municipality are threatened not just from the air, but from underground...

In the Village of Itkhvisi, manganese is cultivated using the underground method. A network of mining tunnels runs below the village. Cracks on the walls of Giorgi Megrelishvili’s house had been growing for years, until in March of last year, an 800-meter-long land mass collapsed and completely buried the house. This is not the only home destroyed in Itkhvisi.

The span of the destruction reached 40 hectares. 20 houses have been completely destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, and a further 86 families are within the risk zone...

The State Commission is not denying that the land subsidence in Itkhvisi is caused by manganese mining works...