This is a pro-regulation blog. We are not anti-mining. This is not an anti-Mandalay Resources blog.

Tuesday, 21 October 2014

Respirable Dust And The Regulators - Grey Plumes? Oh, That'd Be The Blasting

From the ERC Minutes of 1 August, 2007, with regards to Air Quality:

[Local resident ERC Member] B** asked about grey plumes from the mines and Tom deVries [AGD General Manager] stated that they were probably the result of blasting. B** asked if they could have caused the apparently anomalous dust deposition results and Colin Burns stated that this could not be the case because the grey plume would not contain particles that would report to a dust deposition gauge.

"plumes from the mines"... plurals. Multiple grey plumes of blasting dust, fumes and detritus... and anything else... from multiple mines? Seriously. What else was in there?

Grey plumes of what can only be called particulate pollution are casually admitted by the AGD General Manager at an Environmental Review Committee Meeting, and their properties, confidently described by his off-sider, include not being capable of detection by the extant monitoring system (Australian Standard wine flagons). 


Was anyone listening?

In Attendance:
Greg Speirs (Chairman)    City of Greater Bendigo
Len Thomas                      Minerals and Petroleum
Naren Narenthiran             EPA

Apologies:
Colin Thornton                Minerals and Petroleum
Bob Disken                     Minerals and Petroleum
Erin Simpson                  Goulburn Murray Water
Dennis Gilmore               Forests Victoria

More regulators were apologising (as they bloody well should!) than were attending... still, each and every one of them received a copy of the ERC Minutes... How could these people not have known?

And yet no one said a word... 


But that's seven years ago, and so, surely, none of these people could still be making regulatory decisions regarding this mine, could they?

It would only be fair to assume that if such people were, then such people would have cleared up all of the previously unanswered questions by now, would it not? 

Yet even if this were the case, no one could reasonably expect the people of Costerfield to deal with such people, such incompetent and inept people, any longer, could they?

After all, such people had already been told about it all - by the General Manager of AGD, the mining company, himself! - seven years previously. 

Hadn't such people?




 

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