SIXTEEN years have passed since Pasminco lead smelter at Boolaroo ended operations in 2003, but its ghost continues to weigh heavily on some 3000 households living in an official contamination area around the smelter site.
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In the latest chapter of this unfortunate saga, Lake Macquarie City Council wants to revise its planning codes to allow a single "standard" remedial action plan it says will help the affected householders.
As things stand, anyone wishing to build in the affected area - or decontaminate their property - must pay for their own expert's reports, including site inspection reports to determine the level of on-site contamination.
Lake Macquarie MP Greg Piper, who chaired a lead expert working group set up in 2014 by the Environment Protection Authority, says the availability of a standard remedial plan that removes the need in most cases for individual lead assessments is a genuine attempt to make things easier for householders. Mr Piper, a former Lake mayor, may well be correct in his assessment.
But there is no getting away from the points raised by the Boolaroo Action Group, which says the changes will only further distance the polluter from responsibility for the contamination, and further diminish the chances of any future co-ordinated suburban clean-up.
Mr Piper describes the smelter saga as an "unfortunate history", but the reality is that Pasminco was able to walk away from Boolaroo - and refloat its profitable businesses on the stock exchange under a new name - while bearing little responsibility for the decades of contamination that rained down on surrounding households.
From the action group's point of view, the council's proposed changes - well-meaning or not - simply reinforce, or normalise, the idea that land-holders must accept responsibility for pollution they did not create.
The action group has a salient point, too, when it compares the situation at Boolaroo with the PFAS contamination of land surrounding the Williamtown RAAF base.
In both cases, the polluter and the various authorities have assured those affected that everything possible was being done, but in the case of the smelter, the burden remains very much with the neighbours it left behind. This should not have happened after Boolaroo's closure, and cannot be allowed to happen at Williamtown.
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