Unlike the American legal system, courts in Papua New Guinea do their own investigations. On March 1, the judge and lawyers on both sides of the Ramu nickel mine tailings-disposal case jumped in a helicopter to see first hand the environments they’ve been discussing for weeks.

At issue are the plans of the Chinese state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) to extract nickel and cobalt from an area called Kurumbukari, send it through an 84-mile slurry pipeline to their refinery at Basamuk Bay and, after processing, dump the untreated waste into the sea. An estimated 5 million tons of various heavy metals and toxins would be dumped annually.

Whether MCC will be allowed to do so in an operation euphemistically called “deep-sea tailings placement” is expected to be determined by the court in the next few months. (They’ll announce the date of their decision in April.) More than a thousand villagers from the Rai Coast, those most likely to be impacted by the disposal, have joined the lawsuit.

At stake for MCC is the millions of dollars it says it’s losing each week that the project is delayed, and millions more if the court rules it must come up with an alternative method for waste disposal. At stake for the villagers at Basamuk Bay and the Rai Coast is their source of food, the water in which they bathe, and their primary pathways of transportation.

The court case has brought some important facts to light:

• MCC admitted that they’ve already dumped ore into the bay, despite a standing court injunction specifically banning the practice.

• MCC’s contract with the Papua New Guinea government allows it to import ore from other countries and process it at the Basamuk plant, including disposing of those additional tailings in the sea.

• The company used false information in a brochure it distributed to villagers about the deep-sea impacts of the tailings disposal.

• In early March, MCC alerted villagers that they should avoid fishing and swimming in the waters near the Basamuk refinery because of a spill of sulphuric acid that occurred four days earlier. The company later retracted that warning and said only a few liters of acid had dripped onshore. Skeptical villagers report that the coral has turned white and they are afraid to eat fish from the bay.

During our shoot in PNG last April, we visited the sites that the court saw from their helicopter — the refinery site at Basamuk, the mining site at Kurumbukari, the sometimes precariously braced slurry pipeline. We met the lead plaintiff at the time, Sama Mellambo, who has since withdrawn (some people believe his decision was made under duress), and two brothers who were resisting relocation by the mine.

We have constantly been astonished by the reports we hear from this developing story, and we anxiously wait with the rest of the country for the court’s verdict, which will determine the fate of tens of thousands of people and the direction of millions of dollars.