Alcoa

Chemical burns on the swan

Earlier this year a black swan was admitted to a Perth wildlife shelter after it had landed in one of Alcoa’s caustic red mud lakes. The bird’s injuries included burns to its head, eyes, beak, throat and legs as well as internal poisoning.

Alcoa's red mud lakes

The caustic lakes at Alcoa’s four alumina refineries in Western Australia are settling ponds for red mud, a highly alkaline waste material that is both radioactive and contaminated with heavy metals and other pollutants. For very tonne of alumina produced by Alcoa, two tonnes of this residue result and Western Australia produces 12 million tonnes of alumina a year. It is therefore not surprising that the storage of this waste is a significant problem that has faced the industry for many decades. Alcoa’s solution to this problem is to create red mud lakes and allow the waste to dry out in the open.

Alcoa’s Kwinana refinery is located directly next to a wetland containing a couple of lakes called “The Spectacles”. When these lakes dry up as they have done recently it appears that swans in particular find the red mud lakes attractive to land in. Swans being swans immediately have a drink of water upon landing and when that burns their throat they then proceed to have another drink and so on.

DEC have given Alcoa permission to shoot swans

Alcoa's Kwinana refinery next to "The Spectacles"

According to Alcoa this occurred 3 or 4 times in 2009. In the first 2 months of 2010 there has already been that number of casualties. Typically when this happens an Alcoa worker onsite shoots the swan. Alcoa have a licence to do this from the Department of Environment and Conservation (WA) and in case you are wondering, shooting is deemed to be a humane form of euthanising a bird if it is over 3kg.

Should Alcoa attempt to cover these lakes?

The West Australian government has deemed it acceptable that Alcoa can create these vast caustic red mud lakes and leave them uncovered. Further they have also given permission to shoot our state bird emblem whenever they land in these poisonous bodies of water that are located next to existing wetlands. A Google-Earth view of southwest WA between Perth and Collie reveals just how huge these red mud lake areas are, they can be seen from an altitude of 500km!

Caustic burns

The fate of our swan

As for our injured swan, an avian vet thought she had a chance so an intense program of bathing, applying creams and tube feeding (4 times daily) was undertaken. Our main concern was that about a third of her tongue had been eaten away but nevertheless her condition appeared to be improving. On one morning several weeks later the lower portion of her beak just fell off and she unfortunately had to be euthanased.

Alcoa's then Director of WA Operations
Giulio Casello demonstrates what a healthy
swan's tongue should look like

This is what a swan's tongue looks like
after it drinks from an Alcoa caustic lake

This was obviously a devastating blow for all involved. All that is except for the people at Alcoa who viewed this whole incident as an opportunity to advertise their “green credentials”. A story appeared in an internal Alcoa newsletter claiming that the swan saved by “Alcoans” had recovered and had been released successfully into surrounding wetlands. This story was then picked up by the local paper under the headline “Swanning around”. The journalist wrote:

….this black swan wandering around Kwinana’s Residue area….. The swan was checked out by a vet and was later released into wetlands in the Kwinana area

Levels of fluoride dust from a brick factory at Craigieburn and the Alcoa aluminium smelting plant near Portland are proving fatal to kangaroos. DSE was informed of the problem in 2008 and the EPA was told in 2005, but signs of fluoride-related symptoms in kangaroos were noted as early as 2001. We know we cannot rely on the DSE's wildlife statistics and most of us have heard that the EPA is a toothless tiger, but how many of us would have thought there was enough fluoride dust out there to kill herds of kangaroos? Where does that put humans, especially children?

Our kangaroos are dying of fluoride poisoning in Victoria

Deborah Gough's article, "Roos victims of factory fluoride," February 21, 2010 The Age:http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/roos-victims-of-factory-fluoride-20100220-oms2.html reveals a nightmare. The article merits ongoing discussion so that the information does not perish with the fish and chips wrapping.

If, like me, you were confident that Australian governments were able to judge safe levels of fluoride in water, you may wish to review your opinion now. Although the Age article is about levels of fluoride dust from brick factories and the Alcoa aluminium smelting plant near Portland, causing deaths in wildlife - and you may not be wildlife - the level of incompetence in environmental 'regulation' and waste 'management' here seems quite alarming. The degree of poisoning is awful. Why would anyone believe that with such incompetence and callousness prevailing in Victorian government and business that humans in Victoria were safe?

Biggest fluoride polluters in Victoria

According to The Age in Victoria:

The Alcoa smelter in Portland emits 120 tonnes of fluoride dust a year
Austral Bricks in Craigieburn emits 60 tonnes a year
Melbourne Water emits more fluoride than any other agent overall.

The Age gives its source as the National Pollutant Inventory.

Responding to inquiries about the fluoride poison-related deaths of many kangaroos in the Portland and Craigieburn areas,

"EPA director of environmental services Bruce Dawson denied the authority had been slow to reduce maximum emission levels. He said that while the levels were safe for humans, it was now clear they were too high for some animals and a new level was likely."

According to this Age article, Wildlife Victoria had told the Department of Sustainability about the problem of fluoride emissions and kangaroos in 2008! The EPA had been told about it in 2005. Signs of fluoride-related poisoning in kangaroos were noted as early as 2001.

Sounds like the Department of Sustainability ignored this alert too, or, even worse, culled and disposed of the signs or allowed someone else to do so.

And, if it is only clear now to the EPA that the levels were too high for wildlife, why would we have confidence that the levels were okay for humans, particularly babies, and particularly over time?

The situation for the kangaroos seems so severe that I cannot find words to say how it makes me think of my government and the industries emitting these toxins. If people have knowingly allowed this to happen then they are inhuman.

"Scores of starving and pain-ridden kangaroos have been culled after developing tooth and bone deformities from breathing and ingesting fluoride emissions. Many more are believed to be suffering from growths that will kill them. The affected kangaroos are living near the Alcoa aluminium smelter in Portland, in the state's south-west, and the Austral Bricks factory at Craigieburn."

Mr Dawson (EPA Director of Environmental Services) said the EPA had demanded that Austral ''significantly reduce'' its fluoride emissions by building new facilities and upgrading technologies, but neither it nor Alcoa were 'in breach' of regulations. Obviously the regulations are hopeless.

Dawson said the levels were safe for humans.

There is actually a lot of doubt about what constitutes safe levels of fluoride over time and it is hard to have faith in such pronouncements, especially for babies and children, when authorities in Melbourne were able to ignore or not able to understand that the fluoride levels were so dangerous as to be causing tooth deformities in kangaroos so that they were starving and moved painfully.

"Autopsies performed at Melbourne University on 49 kangaroos culled at Alcoa on a single day last year found all but one were suffering from fluorosis, which leads to excessive bone growths, or lesions, on joints in the paws, ankles and calves. It can also cause tooth and jaw deformities that hinder eating and foraging."

Alcoa has been in the business of managing fluoride for a long time. How come it isn't aware of its toxicity in all conditions by now?

And, apparently culling of the kangaroos has been going on quietly, presumably with government permission.

The Sunday Age has been told more than 200 ill kangaroos living near both affected sites have been culled in recent years, but this figure could not be confirmed

This time the culling may have prevented the alarm being raised sooner. The recent Auditor General's report is evidence that the Department of Sustainability has been issuing licenses to cull kangaroos and other wildlife without any reliable wildlife statistics. Have ill-advised kangaroo culls in the area also disguised what must be a high mortality rate in these animals from poisoning? In other words, is this another flow-on from the Victorian Government's failure to monitor the welfare and population dynamics of our wildlife?

Perhaps those 'nuts' who resisted fluoridation of Queensland's water recently were right after all. One certainly cannot ignore the fact that there is little evidence for fluoridation of water supplies and quite a bit contradicting its supposed benefits for teeth.

From this poisoning epidemic we should derive the lesson that our living environment, those species that share this world with us are like us. If they suffer, we are likely to suffer. If we ignore their suffering we may well be turning our backs on clear warnings about our own predicament.

Our predicament is not the poisoned environment alone, it is also our helplessness to treat our fellow creatures decently because of the wall of obscure regulations and power thrown up by our commercial-in-confidence-government. A society which allows other creatures to be dispossessed and herded into toxic land then culled and disposed of with no public outcry is depraved.