The law-and-order situation in the Porgera Valley and issues along the road at the landslip areas of Mulitaka in Enga province continues to affect the mining operations at New Porgera Limited (NPL).
Just last week on Thursday 17th October, NPL issued a notice announcing that the Porgera mine has stood down operations due to recent violence in the Mulitaka area and illegal roadblocks along the Highlands Highway.
Since the announcement, there has been nothing further from NPL on the status of the Porgera mine for almost a week now, meaning that the mine operations have stopped for this long.
This is the second time now that the NPL has had to stood down operations, the first time was in September when NPL announced in a statement on Tuesday 17th September that it had to suspend most of its operations until the 19th of September for the protection of its employees due to law-and-order issues in Porgera, as most of the mine’s workforce is from the local community.
The mine itself employs over 3, 000 workforce and the continued scale down of operations mean workers will be affected too, and another thing to mention as well is the implications to the country’s economy due to the stop work, given that the mine is a major project in PNG.
Nevertheless, NPL says that it will resume operations once law- and- order has been restored to the area.