Broken Hill Mine and Its Legacy of Pollution
The name Kabwe or Kabwe-Ka Mukuba means 'ore' or 'smelting' but the European/Australian prospectors named it after a similar mine in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. The mine became the largest in the country until overtaken in the early 1930s by larger copper mining complexes on the Copperbelt. Apart from lead and zinc it also produced silver, manganese and heavy metals such as cadmium, vanadium, and titanium in smaller quantities.
In 1921 a human fossil (a skull) called Broken Hill Man or Rhodesian Man (classified as Homo rhodesiensis or Homo heidelbergensis) was found in the mine.
The mine, which occupies a 2.5 km² site just 1 km south-west of the town centre, is now closed but metals are still extracted from old tailings. A study by the Blacksmith Institute found Kabwe to be one of the ten worst polluted places in the world due mostly to heavy metal (mostly zinc and lead) tailings making their way into the local water supply.
Read more about this topic: Kabwe
Famous quotes containing the words broken, hill, legacy and/or pollution:
“You would have broken my wings,
but the very fact that you knew
I had wings, set some seal
on my bitter heart, my heart
broke and fluttered and sang.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“O happy, happy each
man whom predestined fate
leads to the holy rite
of hill and mountain worship.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“Like the effects of industrial pollution ... the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)