CONSTRUCTION and building material supplier Hanson is proposing to expand its Brandy Hill Quarry at Seaham to allow it to extract up to 1.5 million tonnes of material over the next 30 years.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It was first approved in 1983, when Port Stephens Council allowed the extraction of 400,000 tonnes per year for major projects including roadworks.
In 2011 the Environment Protection Authority assessed an application by Hanson to lift the 400,000 tonne limit to 700,000 tonnes per year. The EPA received legal advice from Hanson that the original council consent placed no limit on extraction amounts. It approved an environmental licence variation lifting the cap in two months.
The significant expansion went ahead without any community consultation, in the same way that the EPA significantly increased extraction from Daracon's Martins Creek Quarry in an area not too distant from Brandy Hill.
Dungog Shire Council successfully challenged the legality of the EPA's 2007 licence variation for Martins Creek and won. Seaham residents are looking at the Martins Creek and asking why it shouldn't also apply at Brandy Hill.
While hundreds of daily truck movements to and from the quarries are the most visible impact of the two quarries and their boosted production limits, it is the much less visible impacts that have residents just as agitated.
A report commissioned by Hanson for the Department of Planning shows just how significant the impact of an expanded Brandy Hill Quarry could be on Australia's threatened koala populations. While Hanson argues it is just 45 hectares of bush, and it is proposing a biodiversity offset in another part of the state to make up for the loss of koala habitat at Seaham, residents argue it is time to stand up for the koalas that remain.
Drought, hunting, disease and habitat destruction have had an extraordinary impact on koalas and their distribution across eastern Australia over the past century. By the 1930s koalas were present in less than 50 per cent of their previous distribution.
"Given the disjunct populations across the nation, the loss of 45.8 hectares of habitat is likely to be significant to the national population," said the report to the Department of Planning.
It's death by a thousand cuts for koalas.
Issue: 39,215.
