By Gaulbert Sutherland
Photos by Arian Browne
Between crumbling banks of yellow laterite, the Konawaruk River snakes its way downstream, the reddish-yellow waters glistening in the sun, a festering cut amid the towering greenery of the Region Eight jungle.
Nothing stirs below the surface of the silent river. “There ain gat no particular life form that can survive in the water except alligator and even them struggle…the water so murky,” said Floyd Perry, a shop-owner at Mousie Landing, one of several tiny, temporary settlements where miners come to get supplies close to the Konawaruk. “That is sheer mud, fish can’t survive in there at all,” he said.
Branded a “dead” river – incapable of supporting fish or other aquatic life-by environmentalists and a few mining officials over a decade ago, little seemed to have changed for the Konawaruk, with the river filled with sediment giving the water a murky reddish-yellow colour. It has been that way for years, several miners told Stabroek News during a
