After deadly landslide, minister says Penang didn’t gazette quarry rules
(MMO) – The Penang government has not formally adopted guidelines for monitoring quarrying activities in the state, said Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Seri Wan Junaidi Jaafar.
He accused the state of “hiding many things that it has not done”, such as its failure to gazette the quarry rules to manage and monitor quarrying activities in the state.
The Department of Environment (DoE) previously said it recommended against the Tanjung Bungah project that was hit by a landslide on Saturday due to its proximity to an active quarry with regular blasting.
Wan Junaidi told Malay Mail Online that Penang’s failure to adopt the quarry rules meant it could develop within a 600m radius of an active quarry, which the guidelines recommend against.
“We are not talking about distance from the blasting site of a quarry, but the distance of any development has to be 600 metres from a quarry site, the whole quarry site,” he explained.
A landslide occurred at the at the Lembah Permai site in Tanjung Bungah on Saturday, killing 11 workers.
The DoE said it had not supported the project when it came up for approval at the Penang Island City Council (MBPP) One Stop Centre back in 2015.
The MBPP and the state government defended the decision to approve the project without the DoE’s support by saying they took into account recommendations from over 20 other agencies including the Mineral and Geoscience Department.
The state government also insisted that the project site was 714m away from the blasting site of the quarry.
Wan Junaidi questioned the defence, however, and said Penang should have contested the DoE’s refusal to support the scheme if it truly believed that the site was sufficiently removed from the blast zone.
“Why didn’t they object to our letter and point out that the site is not as near as we stated at that time?” he asked.
The minister stressed that he was not contesting the state government’s right to approve development in the state, but explained that he was expressing concern over safety aspects of projects.
He said the reason why the DoE did not back the project was because of concerns about possible danger to the lives of future residents as well as their wellbeing.
When asked why the department had not requested for an environmental impact assessment (EIA) to be conducted on the site, Wan Junaidi argued that this was moot as the department had already recommended against the project.
He added that the EIA would have been necessary had the DoE given conditional approval for the project, which he said the department clearly did not.
“If we already don’t support the project, it means the project should not go ahead, so why would we ask for an EIA?” he said.
As for the two other nearby projects that state government and MBPP claimed the DoE had approved, the minister said the two — for a college and three-storey houses — were on different terrain.
“These projects are different geographically and topographically so it shouldn’t be compared with the high-rise project,” he said.
The Penang state government is under fire over the deadly landslide incident that it labelled a “work site accident”.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and political opponents have criticised the state government for approving the project while the state alluded that it could be due to negligence at the construction site.
