"Things have really changed since last year," Nau said. "People have a lot of new health problems [like] strange respiratory disorders since touching the waste."
Chhim Poeu, a teacher in Bettrang, says that many local people connect the dump site with numerous deaths over the past year. "I can count 14 strong, healthy people who've died in the past year, who shouldn't have died," Poeu said.
Prove it
As far as the Cambodian government is concerned, there is no longer any cause for residents to worry. According to Heng Nareth, Director of the Department of Pollution Control under the Ministry of the Environment, comprehensive surface and ground water testing was conducted by the WHO in recent months at eight locations in and around the former dump site. "The latest results from samples taken in October indicate all values [of mercury contamination] are still well below safe drinking water guidelines," he said.
"We don't want to say we don't believe them [villagers' accounts of long term illness], but we can't do anything without realistic information from physicians."
The waste testing has not gone unchallenged, however. "It was never, in my opinion, tested adequately to identify both the variety of toxic substances or the maximum amounts of these substances," the LAC's toxicologist explained.
"Without this pre-existing know-ledge, one cannot begin to model the ground water contamination."
International environmentalists are also skeptical. Jim Puckett, of the Seattle-based Basel Action Network, is particularly critical of the unrestricted access to the former dumping site.
Although 4,000 tons of topsoil from the site were removed as part of a clean-up by an internationally renowned hazardous waste landfill company, Safety-Kleen Services Inc, Puckett fears that Bettrang residents are still in danger. Of particular concern, he says, are those who regularly comb the site for beetles and lizards which they eat or sell in the Sihanoukville market.
"Putting plants over the site to supposedly prevent access and exposure -- even if somebody bothers to do it -- is a non-solution," Puckett said. "The area should be cordoned off and placed under guard, the ground water and soil continually tested until levels reach background level."
As of yesterday, however, not even the non-solution was being put into practice. The containers stand where they are, their doors flapping at passersby.
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