By Lusine Vardanyan
In the northern reaches of Armenia, the Debed River winds through the mountainous Lori region, carrying with it not just water, but a legacy of environmental devastation that threatens both the ecosystem and the communities that depend on it.
The Debed, Armenia’s most abundant mountain river, stretches 178 kilometers, with 152 kilometers flowing through Armenian territory before crossing into Georgia. Formed by the confluence of the Dzoraget and Pambak rivers, it has historically been a lifeline for numerous communities including Alaverdi, Tumanyan, Neghots, Karkop, Akhtala, Odzun, and others.
But today, this vital waterway faces an existential crisis.
“You can find anything in the water – clothes, shoes, refrigerators, washing machines. People throw everything into the river,” laments a local fisherman. This visible waste is complemented by decades of pollution.
Legacy of industrial contamination
The story of the Debed’s contamination is intertwined with centuries of mining history in the Lori region. Even before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, French companies were smelting copper in the mines of Lori and Tavush.
Alaverdi, the largest community in the Debed Gorge, was a prominent industrial city during the Soviet era, earning the distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the region.
“Heavy metals and such compounds don’t disappear – they only accumulate. They don’t break down. The compound might decompose, but the heavy metal remains a heavy metal,” explains Inga Zarafyan, founder of the environmental NGO Ecolur.
Arsenic cemetery
Near the Madan River sits what locals call the “arsenic cemetery” – a storage facility built in 1978-80 to contain arsenic produced by the former mining and metallurgical combine. Today, it poses a severe threat to public health.
“This arsenic mixes with water and enters the irrigation system,” says Oleg Dulgaryan, director of the Community Consolidation and Support Center NGO in Alaverdi. “If a child plays with the waste, they naturally ingest arsenic because it’s just openly dumped there.”
Today, the river’s pollution stems primarily from the tailings dams of mining companies, where industrial waste accumulates. Most of these are concentrated in the Alaverdi-Akhtala section. The situation is particularly dire near the village of Mets Ayrum, where one of the Akhtala Mining and Processing Combine’s three tailings dams sits precariously close to residential areas.
The impact on local agriculture has been devastating. Samvel Siradeghyan, a farmer from Tchochkan village, shares his story: “Eight or nine years ago, during spring floods, mining tailings flooded my land, my peach orchard. You can still see that yellowish-gray soil layer. After that, my orchard completely dried up within two or three years. I can’t cultivate it anymore.”
Failed oversight
Despite the evident environmental and health risks, government oversight of mining companies remains weak. Often, companies find it more profitable to pay fines for damage than to organize their operations in a way that mitigates these risks. Water treatment plants along the Debed either don’t function or operate only mechanically, removing solid waste but failing to provide biological purification.
International organizations have studied soil, fruit, vegetable, human hair, and urine samples from the Lori region. In all cases, the levels of arsenic, molybdenum, copper, cadmium, and other heavy metals exceed normal levels by dozens of times.
“We look at these studies and see that they’ve been on the government’s table since the 2000s, with no results,” Zarafyan notes. “For example, if arsenic is found in children’s hair. What should a mother do with a child whose hair contains arsenic, copper, and molybdenum? There’s no compensation, no accountability.”
Without significant intervention and stricter enforcement of environmental regulations, the Debed River and the communities along its banks face an uncertain future, caught between the economic benefits of mining and its devastating environmental and health costs.
