The Supreme Court accepted an appeal and reinstated the fine applied against the mining company Candelaria (CCMC) for non-compliance with the mitigation plans for the use of groundwater, authorized in the environmental qualification resolution for the Ojos del Salado works, in the commune of Tierra Amarilla, in the Atacama region.
In this way, the Third Chamber of the highest court established that there was a mistake in the contested sentence that had been issued by the Second Environmental Court, by annulling the sanction applied to the mining company by the Superintendence of the Environment (SMA).
With only one vote against, the ruling determined that the contested sentence did not refer to the technical reports in which the evolution of the groundwater levels in Sector 4 was appreciated, with respect to the period between June 1993 and November from 2015 and from February 2004 to November 2015.
The ruling indicates that these reports “corroborated the sustained drop in the levels of the wells in Sector 4, whose ranges, according to said reports, remained stable between approximately 120 and 130 meters deep to be able to extract water, contradicting what exposed by the company, when presenting an application for approval of the Phase II project, as soon as it indicated that at that level, the worst case scenario, it could reach 54 meters deep, regarding which the sentence does not express anything”.
As for the levels of the wells prior to 2015, the ruling adds that “they were decreasing in such terms that they descended to a depth of 130 meters, thereby lowering the level and quality of the water that existed in the aquifer. The DGA He specified that Aguas Chañar began to reduce the use of water from the wells in the years 2008 to 2012, without this causing a recovery of the aquifer, despite the fact that it also infiltrated or returned unused water to the basin.
“However, in the case of CCMC, when water consumption began to decrease in May 2013, by incorporating desalinated water into its process, a recovery in aquifer levels was found, which is why it concluded that it was This is the one that has the greatest responsibility for the drop in the waters of the wells in sector 4, in the periods that were attributed to it, as can be seen from the analyzes that it says were carried out in the years 2013 and 2014, since it is shown that no the aquifer returned the water it did not use, on the contrary, it delivered it to another mining company,” the ruling states.
