Nineteen Years to Make a Company Clean Up a Creek

Klity Creek runs through a Karen village in Kanchanaburi province, and until 1998 a lead concentrate plant upstream discharged tailings into it. The contamination was found in every resident tested — all 221 of them — and the state agency responsible for cleaning it up did almost nothing for over a decade. EnLAW, formed in 2001 as one of Thailand's first organisations dedicated to environmental litigation for affected communities, brought the villagers' cases and stayed with them across three suits: one administrative, two civil. In 2013 the Supreme Administrative Court ordered the Pollution Control Department to pay compensation and to rehabilitate the creek — the first court-ordered remediation in Thai history — and the Supreme Court later upheld 36 million baht in damages for 151 villagers and ordered the company itself to clean up. The villagers are still waiting on the pace of the clean-up, which is the part that rarely makes the headlines.