A Naturally Occurring Health Issue All Over the Place

According to the Energy and Resources website there are high levels of antimony in the soils of Costerfield and these soils need to be treated with care.

At nine properties the daily intake levels indicated higher than tolerable levels for small children based on ingestion of 100 mg of soil and 1 litre of water per day over a lifetime.

However there are currently no children residing in these properties and once exposure suppression measures are in place antimony levels will be significantly reduced and any risk to children will be minimal.

The independent expert’s report found households in Costerfield should:

• ·        Only drink or prepare food with bottled water
• ·        Young children should not drink water with detectable levels of antimony
• ·        Reduce dust inside their homes
• ·        Minimise ingestion of soil, especially important for children playing outdoors

These instructions are expanded upon, thus:

To minimise the potential for any long term health effects, the mine and the government are supporting people to take steps to reduce their exposure and overall daily intake of antimony.
This includes:

• Only drinking or preparing food with water that complies with the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines
• Ensuring preschool-aged children do not drink water containing any detectable level of antimony (1 microgram per litre), including water used to prepare children’s drinks or baby formula
• Cleaning inside your house to reduce the collection of indoor dust by mopping dust frequently with a damp cloth
• Using gloves when gardening and wash hands thoroughly before eating
• Washing locally grown vegetables clean of soil with water that meets Australian Drinking Water Guidelines before eating
• Keeping toys clean of any soil or dust
• Ensuring children clean their hands thoroughly after playing outside
• Considering covering bare soil in play areas and garden beds with a layer of fresh soil or mulch where preschool-aged children may be present

Antimony in the Costerfield soils - ostensibly the legacy of historical mining - is being treated very seriously and the people of Costerfield are urged to take precautionary measures (the irony!). This despite the report into Costerfield by Professors Priestly and Sim for the Department of Health which notes at page 21:

The soil bioavailability studies of Flynn et al (2003) and Gal et al (2007) although limited to studies of leaching and/or ecotoxicology, but not mammalian toxicity, suggested that Sb mobility and bioavailabilty from contaminated soils is extremely limited, so this is unlikely to be a major contributor to absorption in the Costerfield region. [Emphasis added.]

And so...

Here is a fragment from a Mines Department document - Central Highlands Comprehensive Regional Assessment - Mineral Assessment -  that has recently come to our attention:

Antimony is found in most of the gold occurrences in the western half of the Central Highlands and occurs in stibnite (antimony sulphide mineral). At some mines antimony ore was produced as a by-product of gold. At Steels Creek, 45km northeast of Melbourne CBD, antimony ore was the main product and gold the by-product. Just outside the south-western boundary of the Central Highlands, in the Melbourne suburbs, a small antimony deposit occurs at Templestowe and about 3,500 tonnes of antimony concentrate containing minor gold was produced at Ringwood between 1869 and 1895 (O'Shea et al. 1992). Antimony-gold ore was mined at the Apollo, Golden Dyke Extended mines in the Sunday Creek goldfield 55km north of Melbourne.

Antimony ore has been extracted at the Big River mine in the northern part of Woods Point-Walhalla gold sub-province. Several adits and open pits have been excavated on small reefs in sedimentary rocks adjacent to an early Devonian lamprophyre dyke. Ore samples taken in 1964 assayed 43%-53% antimony and about 500kg of concentrate was produced.

We hope that the people of Steels Creek, Templestowe, Ringwood and Big River have been made aware of the potential for a 'naturally occurring health issue' in their respective areas resulting from historical mining activities, and the necessary precautions they should employ to avoid consuming dust. 

Perhaps they require a rapid assessment, too.