Further investigation into the processes performed by the mine have caused us to rethink some of the details outlined here and to posit alternative explanations for their cause, explanations that are far from speculative.
Remember, we have had to do our own research. And to ask just the right questions or risk running foul of obfuscation and dismissal from the regulators (that's you guys and girls in DSDBI, DOH, CoGB and yup, you guessed it, EPA) that readers of this blog will find all too familiar.
They won't admit to a bloody thing... It is still going on.
We're now moving towards regarding this rolling fog as a by-product of the evaporative procedures of the mine, specifically those entailing the use of evaporative misters to enhance evaporative capabilities.
The undesirability of this method of groundwater disposal was raised on quite a number of occasions in the months and years leading up to and after 2012 when residents were kindly visited by the Hon. Mr John Lenders, then Shadow Minister for Water. Mr Lenders was taken around the mine site by long-time ERC representative and Costerfield farmer Mr Gilbert Cochrane and observed the misters in action. He was not very impressed at the profligacy of this disposal route if our memory serves us correctly.
At that time the water had been deemed to be merely "salty", but Mr Cochrane was very forthright in his opinion of the potential threat such spraying posed to the public health.
Certainly the mine ostensibly ceased the use of these misters in May 2014 under orders from the regulators. This was confirmed at the most recent (August 13) ERC Meeting. We have no doubt that the misters employed at the Brunswick facility were taken out of action as this kind of event ceased to exist over on that side of the road.
However the evaporative facility pictured in the fifth image at the Augusta site also employed misters.
The pictures of the fog below were taken - as is noted - in August of 2014...
That's right, August of 2014...
We'll be assembling another post detailing our latest position on this fog shortly.
Original post begins here:
As we familiarise ourselves more completely with the complex interaction of events and conditions surrounding the Costerfield antimony issues, matters of seemingly little significance are being revealed as potential impacts.
It is only in the past few days that we have become aware of temperature inversion break-up fumigation.
"The mechanism of inversion break-up will have important effects for pollution dispersion (Whiteman and McKee 1978). Assuming that an elevated source has concentrated pollutants in the stable air of the valley floor, growth of the convective boundary layer leads to fumigation, or downward transport, of these pollutants to the valley floor through convective mixing of the boundary layer and the stable air above.This sequence is probable in wide shallow valleys where slope flows are less effective in removing air from the centre of the valley. If the convective boundary layer grows slowly, the pollutants sink as the core of the stable layer descends, producing high concentrations at ground level."
from Mountain Weather and Climate by Roger G. Barry, p. 217.
We display and discuss this in relation to more expansive images of the Wappentake Valley in this post.
"The mechanism of inversion break-up will have important effects for pollution dispersion (Whiteman and McKee 1978). Assuming that an elevated source has concentrated pollutants in the stable air of the valley floor, growth of the convective boundary layer leads to fumigation, or downward transport, of these pollutants to the valley floor through convective mixing of the boundary layer and the stable air above.This sequence is probable in wide shallow valleys where slope flows are less effective in removing air from the centre of the valley. If the convective boundary layer grows slowly, the pollutants sink as the core of the stable layer descends, producing high concentrations at ground level."
from Mountain Weather and Climate by Roger G. Barry, p. 217.
We display and discuss this in relation to more expansive images of the Wappentake Valley in this post.
On 6 September, 2014, we sent the email transcribed below to EPA. The response from the Environment Protection Authority was advice to call the EPA's 1300 number to report a pollution event. This was AFTER the Community Meeting hosted by the regulators at the Heathcote RSL.
We had actually thought that they gave a damn about what was happening in Costerfield and had assigned officers especially to address our specific and pressing concerns, but the EPA officers in attendance at that meeting seem merely to have been part of the Authority's permitting section. Nothing wrong but the paperwork, apparently.
Yup, that's right. The Environment Permitting Authority... wait till you see what we have to tell you about the trucking of water to the Heathcote Pit!
In the reply we received we noticed that the EPA's Manager - North West had been copied in. He has not seen fit to acknowledge or respond to this email in any way, shape or form. Nor have we received a reply to the email that forms the basis of our earlier EPA vs SEPP AQM post.
He told us told he was "happy to be available for enquiries" and would get back to us in the "next week or so"... that was 16 September.
We are still waiting. Probably gone on holiday. We're getting used to that. We're expecting an eventual reply from a consultancy firm.
We are still waiting. Probably gone on holiday. We're getting used to that. We're expecting an eventual reply from a consultancy firm.
***
Hi ****,
I would like to run something by you, if I
may, to see what you reckon may be happening and what you think can be done.
First up, let me say that at my place there are no frogs in the Wapentake Creek. That’s 1.75km from the
mine. A resident further up the creek (as it were :) has raised
this issue before at his place, 1.2km from the mine. He has not had frogs for a
while and fears the issue may be spreading downstream in line with recent CSIRO
research that puts the impact reach of an antimony mine at about a 30km radius.
Next up, a little background into the mine’s operations as I
understand them. At 7am on a Sunday a new shift begins at mine after a 12-hour break. At that time everyone’s out of the mine so blasting takes place for the incoming shift to work with. As with most things
to do with this mine, no active monitoring of the emission of the fumes,
vapours, particulates and residues of the explosives they use takes place.
So, to my tale. I woke up at just before 7am last Sunday, 24
August. Although the sun was up, it was dodging behind a few stray morning
clouds on the horizon. It was cold, crisp, clear and windless. The valley was
still, silvered and frosty. There was a last lingering mist that was quite
motionless.
About quarter past seven, a small pocket of mist about two or
three metres high came sliding down the valley, hugging the creekline. It was
about 400m long and probably 100m wide. It moved down past my place at a little
more than walking pace. It moved through
the still fog that was already there.
I’ve attached some pics of it. Of course, it just looks like
any old mist in the pics… but I think it gives an idea of the odd size of the event. And
the moving fog pushing through and past the hanging mist. Hey, it was odd
enough that I reached for my phone to take a picture at 7 in the morning!
Not long after it had passed me by, the sun came out properly
– see the line of clouds in the last pic - and the mist disappeared completely.
I spoke to my neighbour about this and he tells me it is a not infrequent occurrence when the weather is right. A cold morning with a temperature inversion in the valley. And when it comes down it’s usually after the change of shift at the mine.
I spoke to my neighbour about this and he tells me it is a not infrequent occurrence when the weather is right. A cold morning with a temperature inversion in the valley. And when it comes down it’s usually after the change of shift at the mine.
Any blasting underground in the mine must, of course, vent
at some point to relieve the increased pressure from the explosions. A lot of
this is done at the Portal Area of the mine at Augusta as far as I understand.
Could the heated air from the blasting be escaping the mine, complete with its
selection of fine ammonium-based compounds, and be pushing a cloud of mist down
the Wapentake Creek? Any air that did that would/could contain traces of the
blasting chemicals, wouldn’t/couldn’t it? Suspendable respirable dust and
fumes? And the water in the Creek… has anyone had a proper look into how much
of these nitrogen-based chemicals manage to escape the mine?
There is the timing – just at the start of the Sunday shift after Saturday night off; there is the chemistry – explosives are nasty and the mine uses a helluva lot of them; and there is the fact that there are no frogs in the creek.
Okay, let me temper that last bit somewhat. You can count on one hand the number of frogs in the creek. Seriously, though: on one hand. Last year at this time when I stood in the middle of the bridge that spans the creek at my place you could not hear yourself think for the pobblebonks plucking away at their banjos. It was deafening. They ain’t there now.
They’re not dead. Well a lot of them aren’t coz I know where they are: in the dam a hundred metres from the creek, or in the little wannabe ox bow waterhole sixty metres away. Or another, smaller hole. There’re quite a few frogs there. There are so many frogs in the big dam that it sounds like they’re in the creek as you walk towards them. Not very many at all in the creek, though. They’ve moved away. From something.
There is the timing – just at the start of the Sunday shift after Saturday night off; there is the chemistry – explosives are nasty and the mine uses a helluva lot of them; and there is the fact that there are no frogs in the creek.
Okay, let me temper that last bit somewhat. You can count on one hand the number of frogs in the creek. Seriously, though: on one hand. Last year at this time when I stood in the middle of the bridge that spans the creek at my place you could not hear yourself think for the pobblebonks plucking away at their banjos. It was deafening. They ain’t there now.
They’re not dead. Well a lot of them aren’t coz I know where they are: in the dam a hundred metres from the creek, or in the little wannabe ox bow waterhole sixty metres away. Or another, smaller hole. There’re quite a few frogs there. There are so many frogs in the big dam that it sounds like they’re in the creek as you walk towards them. Not very many at all in the creek, though. They’ve moved away. From something.
We undertook testing of the water in the Creek some time
back… somebody had to do it at some stage… No one in any regulatory position
had bothered. Because of the stop-start nature of the flows in the creek, such
monitoring should be taking place on a regular basis. Recognition needs to be
given to the fact that when the creek forms the “chain of ponds” that Major
Thomas Mitchell described in 1835 (see the entry for October 7: “Valley of the
Deegay”) there is a concentrating effect on the chemicals – healthy or
otherwise – in the water.
That’s how an evaporation facility works…
And that’s why the mine isn’t permitted to spray
groundwater, ahem, Category A Industrial Waste, on the roads or into the air via
misters anymore…
Certainly a rain event will flush the creek, but the nasty
stuff has already done its job: driving out or killing the wildlife. And then
there’d be the residue left in and on the banks and the soils.
This is a groundwater-fed creek system. Is blasting residue
infiltrating the groundwater? Widening the fracturing of an already fractured
rock aquifer system by blasting would/could allow this to happen, no?
And it may not be just (or, I’ll admit, even) the blasting.
Although we won’t know if we don’t look. The very presence of antimony mining
in the area should be enough to ring alarm bells about “mine and tailings dam
seepage” as per this Journal of Geochemical Exploration Abstract:
According to the report Controls on Antimony Speciation and Mobility
in Legacy Mine Tailings Environments: A Case Study of Mineral Occurrences in
the Tintina Gold Province, Alaska and Yukon, in research supported by
the US Geological Survey:
An essential aspect of
developing such models [to predict the potential for environmental
contamination associated with mineral resource development] is access to high
quality water, sediment and soil chemistry data sets from well-characterized
mineral deposits. These data sets can be used to predict the identity and the
levels of potentially trace elements based on similarities in ore deposit
mineralogy, host rock lithology and other geo-environmental variables. It is
also essential that the key physiochemical processes controlling trace element
speciation (e.g. oxidation state, aqueous-solid phase partitioning and the mode
of association with major/minor element phases) are understood in order to
extend the geo-environmental model concept to include prediction of downstream
trace element mobility and potential bioavailability (Smith and Huyck, 1999),
as well as to provide insights into the efficacy of potential treatment and
remediation scenarios.
It’d be nice to see that sort of thing happen, wouldn’t it?
Extend a concept to include prediction. That’s one way to institute Protection…
and that’s your middle name! Instead, as seems to be the case with everything
to do with this mine, we wait until the horse has bolted before shutting the
gate: water to the Heathcote Pit; installing dust monitors after the dust
event; taking years to (nearly) fix up noise issues; examining the possibility
of pollution via the emission of blasting residues via air and water…
Something is going on in Costerfield that is going to have
permanent and detrimental effects unless people start taking notice.
What do you think it might be? What sort of thorough
testing and investigations do we have to do to find out? How can we get them
done?
Cheers
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