Despite the fact that water management is a complex issue, a recognition that some people have too much and some too little, often reaches to the heart of particular situations.
It's been an issue with mining across Bendigo for years. And it's been getting worse recently. Costerfield is just part of a bigger, disturbing picture.
Toxic Water and Evaporative Ponds in the News in Bendigo
Posts in this section address a number of aspects of water and water management in Costerfield (and Heathcote), including:
1. Residents' specific concerns about the toxic water being sprayed about their town to facilitate its disposal by a mine that has been enabled to accumulate too much.
Council was told of the water's questionable quality by residents
Letter to the City of Greater Bendigo Council - Vile Water, Vapour and Poor Quality Clay
But ignorantly dismissed the residents' concerns
A Rehabilitated Pit?... Not At All Ms Mansfield
And look what happened
A New Herbicide Courtesy DSDBI and EPA
Then it was going to be pumped into a construction site to fill holes.
It's Not An Evaporation Facility Yet... Or Is It?
And it's still going to be used to "condition" the clays in preparation for the building of a facility that is supposedly designed to keep this water out of the environment! It's use has even been written into the Work Plan!
Please Advise the Costerfield Community, Mr Thornton
When it is trucked and dumped, ahem, discharged into Hirds Pit in Heathcote, it has this sign to grace its presence:
And the hydrogeological and geological examinations and justification for dumping it into Hirds Pit? They can be found here.
SKM, SRK... EPA, MIA
2. Historical and general investigations into water and water management that display the inadequate attention paid to establishing baseline conditions in the area
How things started off on the wrong track
Initial Hydrogeological Investigations
The interconnectedness of the various regulatory inadequacies is commenced in this, the blog's first piece
Respirable Dust and Evaporation Ponds - A Beginning
For a long time now, the mine has being doing well for itself financially (so it would seem given the ongoing expansion). Yet it has had too much water to cope with. Water must be pumped out of the mine and the surrounding ground so that workers don't need scuba gear to do their jobs. This water is stored in what are endearingly termed Evaporative Ponds... ponds. We always thought ponds were where frogs lived. No frogs live in these things.
The water is too rich in salts and metals from the underlying geology to be fit for drinking or stock watering purposes without treatment.
In the past the treatment option has been avoided. Much preferred is the less expensive option of depositing concentrated amounts of these toxic salts and heavy metals in big holes in the ground and evaporating the water away. Huge deposits of toxic chemicals permanently encased in the Costerfield earth. Forever. Claims that there will be "rehabilitation" of these facilities when they are no longer needed are never fulfilled. This iteration of the mine has never seen a rehabilitated evaporation dam or pond, despite Permit conditions demanding this. And the regulators have never pulled them up on it.
(It's all about the difference between a facility's "use" and "usefulness" it seems. As long as there is a possibility that technological improvements may enable further extraction of metals from the tailings and dams, these accumulations of toxic material remain uncapped and unrehabilitated. Collectiing stormwater and rainfall run off, whatever that is.)
For a long time in there, during the drought that afflicted all Victorian workers of the land, the farmers of Costerfield didn't have enough water. Their creeks ran dry (not ceased to flow) for the first time in memory. There was a drought they were told. The mine was simultaneously increasing its dewatering of the area to access deeper minerals. But that was apparently beside the point because... well, there was a drought.
All light-heartedness aside, the farmers watched as water that could have been treated and sent down the creeks to provide them with the amenity of water usage that they had always employed with their stock was allowed to evaporate away, un-utilised. Wasted.
(When dust blew over Costerfield in 1997-8 the mine was deemed "unlikely" to have been the sole cause; but it was at least - the very least - admitted as "additional" to the problem. This from a letter from the office of the Minister of the day.
Is it not possible that during dry periods the mine's dewatering could also be "additional" to the loss of water reported by farmers? We won't know, because the initial hydrogeological report required by the Permit was not completed before dewatering commenced; against the specific requirements of the conditions of the Permit.)
No one has ever said that drought has no impact on Costerfield (although meteorological records will confim that the area is definitely spared the worst of conditions in comparison to other places).
Goulburn-Murray Water allowed the mine to more than triple it's water allocation from 179ML/year to 700ML/year, using extrapolations for the whole of the catchment as justification that local effects would not be felt. There was no indication from G-MW, despite numerous attempts at communications on our part, that this water authority had considered either the water that fell across the Costerfield Operations site or the veracity of any claims to the evaporative potentials of the mine's various disposal routes, in its calculations to allow the increased extraction of groundwater.
Regulations are supposed to ensure that nothing that is sourced from the minesite, other than the ore, can leave the site. Thus the dewatered groundwater is not supposed to leave Costerfield and must be retained by the mine. Hence evaporative ponds. But the site is expanding and calculations of the amount of rain trapped within the mine's boundaries would push the actual amount of water being denied the creek to 1GL.
And the mine site at Augusta isn't big enough to hold any more "ponds" so the EPA approved the piping of water through Crown Land to another location owned by the mine on a property directly over the road from a chemical-free farm in a rural residential area. Somehow, this passed muster as the water "remaining onsite"
The regulators have irresponsibly allowed the mine to be profligate in its extraction, use and disposal of Australia's most precious resource. They have allowed the mine to extract and retain more water than it was or is capable of, and have then actively assisted the mine in dealing with a problem that was entirely avoidable by disposal methods that are questionable at best, and undoubtedly environmentally destructive. And they have done so in a manner that, especially on the part of the Environment Protection Authority, suggests regulatory capture.
The EPA is charged by the people of Victoria, who instituted the Authority and put money in its managers' pockets, with protecting the environment. The EPA is not charged with assisting mines in the pollution of Victoria or the endangerment of the Victorian people. These "regulators" contorted regulations and allowed Mandalay Resources to truck vast amounts of toxic groundwater to the disused Heathcote Pit based on deceptive reports.
This water presents a potential health and environmental issue to the town of Heathcote that has been disregarded by the regulators; until December 2014, when this blog drew attention to the EPA's over-faciltating inactions, monitoring bores had not been placed to detect any possible seepage from the pit into surface and groundwaters, despite attention being brought to the issue repeatedly over the long period that trucking took place.
No baseline measurements to indicate any thought of the precautionary principle that deliberately underlies the EPA Act 1970.
And, still unable to deal with the unpredictable rainfall trends (who, with any sense, counts on the weather in this land of drought and flooding rain?) and not helped by errant calculation methodologies for evaporation in the area, the mine proposed, and had approved by Council, a further evaporation facility at Splitters Creek.
Residents, concerned that this toxic water storage facility was only metres from their front door, objected. The case was heard by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal which applied 29 additional conditions to what was obviously an under-considered and under-regulated Permit. Chief among these conditions was the imposition of an increased impermeability level for the facility - the Tribunal Members pointedly referenced the Precautionary Principal in requiring more "stringent" measures to prevent the facility leaking.
Victoria still employs regulatory standards from 2004 to safeguard surface and groundwaters from the threat of contamination from toxic water in evaporation facilities. The residents who took Bendigo Council to VCAT were able to have conditions that are legislated in South Australia applied here. It was a very costly, time consuming and exhausting process.
But, once again EPA thwarted the precautionary intent of the VCAT Tribunal Members by appointing, as an "independent" auditor, one of Mandalay Resources' expert witnesses from the hearing. An expert witness who works for URS, a consultancy firm with whom the mine has dealt for years and who produce the mine's reports and other facilitating literature.
And the results have been laughable.
And then came the approval for the lifting of the walls of the Brunswick and Bombay Dams. And Bendigo Council, underlining its inability to adequately consider issues of any great importance, let the time for approval tick away without reaching a decision. This meant that the only avenue of objection for the concerned residents was through the costly, intensive and intimidating VCAT process.
Council was not prepared to have its ignorance placed under scrutiny again. And no wonder. It's made a mockery of the system for too long.
It won't be long, we predict, before Lot 1 at Splitters Creek gets incorporated into the Evaporative Facility now under construction. There'll be a Work Plan Variation underway, you can bet on it.
We'll be back soon.
Oh, And It Rains in Costerfield, Too! Catch Up!
Two EPAs Again
Reverse Osmosis
Hydrogeology
Dewatering (G-MW 700ML)
Dead sheep in the news
No comments:
Post a Comment
Be civilised and rational... rants and abuse will be moderated out of existence.