FOR many decades, the Sulphide/Pasminco lead and zinc smelter at Boolaroo was known as one of the worst environmental and community health hazards in the state.
Thanks to the smelter, a toxic legacy of heavy metals underlies Cockle Creek and the northern tip of Lake Macquarie. A century of poisonous atmospheric fallout has left its traces in houses, parks and gardens and ‘‘Sulphide slag’’ – once considered a benign and useful landscaping product and given away by the truck and trailer-load – is quietly leaching chemical content into the ground in untold locations across the Lower Hunter.
During the final years of the smelter’s operation, as researchers discovered more and more about the subtler harmful effects of lead, the plant’s then owner – Rio Tinto – floated it off as part of a new entity known as Pasminco.
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Consistently unable to meet acceptable standards for industrial fallout, the smelter came under immense pressure to clean up its act.
By the year 2000, Pasminco was in financial strife and, to make things worse, its Cockle Creek and Port Pirie smelters were facing a class action from residents seeking compensation for alleged lead poisoning.
The action failed, and so did Pasminco, passing into administration where it has been ever since.
It was always clear that the problems left by Pasminco would be extremely difficult to rectify. The administrators, whose legal responsibility is chiefly to recover funds for the defunct corporation’s bank creditors, have worked with authorities to ready the former smelter site for redevelopment and to ‘‘abate’’ the effects of the smelter’s legacy of pollution.
While important work has been done, it seems fair to suggest that the authorities have taken their eyes off the ball. Sampling and monitoring, in both the environment and the population, should have been a continuing work in this known toxic hotspot.
It should not have been left for this newspaper to pick up the slack and reveal that lead still contaminates many public and private properties to an unacceptable extent.
The EPA can allege deficiencies in the Herald’s commissioned analyses but that’s the pot calling the kettle black when the organisation with a statutory responsibility in this sphere appears to have been missing in action for years.
Health authorities are belatedly returning to conduct population blood tests, but much more needs to be done.
Pasminco’s administrator Ferrier Hodgson, its creditors and the state government that rubber-stamped the lead abatement strategy need to come back to the table and deal with the reality: the strategy has not been the comprehensive success some had hoped for.
