Alison Simmons has started buying bottled water for her grandchildren. The farmer and retired nurse has lived at her property near Forest Reefs, about 8km from Cadia Hill goldmine in central west New South Wales, for 30 years. She has always relied on rainwater and never felt any ill-effects.
But when the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) announced an investigation into the Cadia goldmine regarding its management of “emissions of dust and other pollutants”, she decided she could no longer risk it.
“Until the results are in on this, it seems to me imprudent to let any young children drink the water or clean their teeth in it,” she says.
“I’ve been drinking the water for years. I’m a sole occupier, so my water consumption is not high and I wouldn’t have great disturbances of the sediment at the base of my tank … But whatever is sitting at the base of my tank, I won’t know until I test it.”
‘Significant changes’ to reduce dust
The Cadia Hill goldmine has been under intense scrutiny since March, when testing of water collected in residential rainwater tanks in communities surrounding the mine, conducted on behalf of Cadia Community Sustainability Network, found that of the 70 samples collected more than a third contained more than 10 times the level of lead listed in NSW health guidelines.
The EPA then issued the mine’s operator, Newcrest, with a pollution prevention notice and notice of licence variation, with CEO Tony Chappel saying “currently Cadia appears to be falling well short of our expectations”.
Last week, the regulator ordered Newcrest to take immediate action or face serious consequences over “completely unacceptable” levels of air pollution, after testing revealed the main vent of the mine was emitting more than 11 times the regulatory limit of dust containing heavy metals.
Those preliminary air pollution results came from the mine’s main vent, VR8, which is known as the “crusher vent” because it extracts contaminated air from where the ore is crushed deep underground. It was expelling up to 570 milligrams per cubic metre of dust, despite a new ventilation system that included installing a bag house which catches one tonne of dust an hour. An EPA expert told Guardian Australia that’s just a tenth of all emissions leaving that vent.
On Friday, the EPA said Newcrest had made changes to its underground productions to “significantly reduce” the amount of dust produced. The company is also installing additional dust sprays, reconfiguring the dust extraction system, installing more dust sampling instruments and putting a rush on an order of dust filtration units.
It’s also sampling the vent rise emissions, as required in the May licence variation. The first results are due on Monday.
Chappel says Newcrest has “responded with significant changes but there is still more work to be done”.
“Our investigations are ongoing and we will be monitoring compliance closely – the health of the community and the environment is our priority,” he says.
Cadia general manager Mick Dewar said the company would continue to work with the EPA to meet its compliance requirements.
“The health and safety of people is not a negotiable for us, and we take our environmental obligations seriously,” he says. “In response to the NSW EPA advice, we took immediate steps to curtail known sources of dust in the underground.”
Chappel says the EPA has also appointed a panel of independent experts tasked with “providing advice and ensuring transparency” while the regulator conducts its investigation, as well as providing advice “on the sampling, testing and monitoring to understand the extent, impact and potential of pollutants making their way into the Cadia valley community”.
The panel members include Dr Ian Wright, who helped conduct the community-driven rainwater tank testing, and the chief environmental scientist of the Victorian EPA, Mark Taylor.
The EPA is still investigating what is in the dust and how far dust clouds may have spread. That includes testing the isotopes of heavy metals found in the sediment of some rainwater tanks that can be traced back to the mine.
Newcrest maintains that the mine is not causing a rise in air pollution. It pointed reporters to an analysis by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, released by this week, which sampled fine particulate matter (PM2.5) at four sites near the mine – Millthorpe, Mandurama, Panuara and Orange – twice a week over a 12 month period. The average PM2.5 mass at the first three sites was 2.7 micrograms per cubic metre at at Orange it was 5.3µg/m3, below the National Environment Protection Measures guidelines of 8µg/m3.
Drinking water tests conducted by NSW Health, which sampled water as it came out of the kitchen tap, not directly from the tank, fell within Australian drinking water guidelines. Newcrest also tested the water of 145 homes, eight of which showed elevated levels of heavy metals. Four of the eight, the company alleges, were due to plumbing and building materials in the home.
The EPA has also begun its own rainwater testing program, which has collected samples from more than 50 properties, the results of which are yet to be finalised. Simmons’ tanks are on the list to be sampled next week.
Authorities have urged locals to remain calm until they have more information but the community remains on edge. Many are getting their blood tested to check for elevated levels of heavy metals.
Urgent issue, bureaucratic response
Simmons says that because she is in “good health and asymptomatic”, she is not planning to get tested – at least not until she has the results from her water tanks.
Another local nurse, who asked to remain anonymous, told Guardian Australia she had had been “strongly discouraged” from getting her blood tested by a local GP who said she had received advice from NSW Health not to order tests unless people had “symptoms of heavy metal poisoning” or a clear exposure pathway.
That advice came from a webinar held by NSW Health local GPs on 14 June, in which they were warned that blanket testing of worried residents could fuel anxiety in the community.
“I’m pretty sure there’s already anxiety in the community about heavy metals floating around in our water supply,” the nurse says. “That creates anxiety in the community, whether [the results are] normal or not.”
She did get her blood tested and will have to wait a few weeks for the results. Blood tests are used to check for lead, while other heavy metals are usually screened for using a urine sample.
A toxicologist who gave advice in the NSW Health webinar, seen by Guardian Australia, warns that toxicology results can easily be misinterpreted and that tests need to be “very specific” and targeted.
“Unclear heavy metal testing and detections often cause significant and unnecessary concern to patients and families,” the toxicologist says.
At a community meeting in Orange on 17 June, hosted by the Central West Environment Council, Greens MLC Sue Higginson listened as residents described the frustration they felt at the pace of the regulatory response.
“We’re getting this evidence now that there’s possibly serious harm that’s not just any longer to the receiving environment, it’s now spread to the community,” she says.
Higginson says the decision of NSW Health to wait for more advice from the EPA before recommending further testing “might make sense from a bureaucratic perspective but from the perspective of the communities that could be exposed to poisons – this is an urgent issue that must be treated with utmost urgency”.
“Once the environmental circumstances of the Cadia pollution have been established, NSW Health should conduct broad and targeted testing for poisons identified as being in the environment,” she says.
