2nd half of transcipt...
"Don't dig here". It wasn't a solution at all, was it?
GRAEME RICHARDSON: No it wasn't an adequate solution. That's what I am saying. It's not an adequate solution. It is a solution that they saw as appropriate at that time. It's not adequate in today's terms. I must correct you that there are no emissions from that site. There was one emission from that site, which was some vapour coming through the plastic. That has been resealed and that has fixed that.
TARA BROWN: Is the carpark a classic symbol of how you guys dealt with your pollution problems — bury it and hope it goes away?
GRAEME RICHARDSON: I can't speak for ICI, who made those decisions back in 1980.
TARA BROWN: Orica says those sorts of allegations are from a different time, when a different company ran the site. It's a bit of a furphy really to say that Orica is a different company, isn't it?
GRAEME RICHARDSON: I don't believe so. The fact is that ICI owned and controlled an entity in Australia through until about 1998, at which time it sold its shares to the Australian public.
TARA BROWN: But seven out of your 10 current executives were with the company when it was called ICI Australia. You've effectively changed your name. You haven't changed anything else.
GRAEME RICHARDSON: Which executives?
TARA BROWN: Your current CEO has been with the company since 1989. Your general manager of consumer products has been with the company for 27 years. Your general manager, people and community, has been with the company for 27 years. Your group manager, strategy and acquisitions, has been with the company since 1992. Your general manager of chemical services has been with the company for 20 years.
GRAEME RICHARDSON: All those people...
TARA BROWN: Your CEO of Orica mining services has been with the company since 1985.
GRAEME RICHARDSON: The management of the company changed in about 2002 and the attitude of the company towards the contamination changed absolutely dramatically in the early 2000s. There was a total commitment by the board and management to clean up this site.
TARA BROWN: In Cheshire, England, they know all about ICI burying its problems. Here, in the village of Weston, they also have the neighbour from hell — another ICI plant. This one used to dump its toxic waste in a local quarry.
MIKE PRICE: They decided it would be a great place to dump their junk from the chemical works.
TARA BROWN: Mike Price had to live with the consequences.
MIKE PRICE: Eventually it was covered with earth and plenty of rubble, it started to seep and the muck came through to the surface.
TARA BROWN: And how toxic was that muck?
MIKE PRICE: That was toxic enough to burn the soles off your shoes.
TARA BROWN: Forty houses in the village, where dangerous levels of toxic gas were detected, had to be demolished. Horses now graze on the empty plots.
MIKE PRICE: People were seeing the house they had lived in for years there one day and nothing the next.
TARA BROWN: What was that like?
MIKE PRICE: There was a lot of anger, a lot of fear and there were actually people crying in the street when they were talking to friends about it.
TARA BROWN: Back here in Australia, the fear is for Botany Bay. Orica says the underground plume which is heading towards the bay at 100m a year is being contained. The signs say otherwise. When you're making acid, solvents, plastics and the like, you are, by nature, dealing with dangerous and volatile substances. And no-one knows more about those dangers than these people — former ICI workers and their relatives meeting here for the first time to share some disturbingly similar stories.
PHIL ATKINSON: We used to pull bodies out of the autoclave — blokes knocked out with the gas, just totally knocked out.
TARA BROWN: Phil Atkinson worked in the mixing tanks in the plastic section.
PHIL ATKINSON: What you'd do then is, you would drop a hose in, blow air into the vessel to get the gas out, go in and drag them out.
TARA BROWN: What would happen if you didn't get to these workers in time?
PHIL ATKINSON: They'd die.
TARA BROWN: How often would leaks occur?
MAN: All day. All day, every day, every shift.
PHIL ATKINSON: When you would scr ape the walls the gas would come out from behind the walls and get you. We were told it was all right. We were told you could eat the PVC, it wouldn't hurt you.
TERRY MUNRIGHT: It all came down to how cheaply can you make the product and that's all that mattered, the product. It didn't matter about the fellas.
TARA BROWN: Now remember the moon suits and that shed-full of hexachlorobenzene, HCBs? Terry Munright knows the area well. He used to fill those drums.
TERRY MUNRIGHT: It's bad stuff.
TARA BROWN: What would you wear while you were wearing the...
TERRY MUNRIGHT: Overalls.
TARA BROWN: Gloves, masks?
TERRY MUNRIGHT: Yeah, gloves. No masks. Nothing was insisted upon. If you looked at the engineers when they came out on to the plant, they were done up like the Michelin man. They had all this on. You would think, 'What are they wearing that for?'
TARA BROWN: You've poisoned the water. Have you also poisoned the workers?
GRAEME RICHARDSON: No. Not to my knowledge. There has been no issue arising as far as I am aware that has caused any harm to any former employee.
TARA BROWN: Jackie Douglas's father worked at ICI for 11 years. A year after leaving, he went to the doctor feeling unwell.
JACKIE DOUGLAS: And we were told he had leukaemia. That was it — three weeks later he was dead. He was 56.
TARA BROWN: Now, cancer can strike anyone in any industry but it appeared to these people that, at Botany, it struck too often to be a coincidence.
MAN: My father got a cancer in the pancreas that one person in a million would get. It was inoperable. And, yet, three other blokes that worked with dad, they all died of cancer, too. The priest out there, the priest at ICI, he died of cancer.
TARA BROWN: June Idon's husband, Jim, worked at the chlorine plant.
JUNE IDON: He was constantly sent home in distress, where he had had gas on his lungs and had no oxygen, couldn't breathe. And I used to say, "Leave there. You're going to die. It's going to kill you." But we needed the money. He came in Sunday morning, got into bed, I went in the kitchen, did a couple of things, went back, and he was dead. Just like that. No — just died.
TARA BROWN: Two decades after first learning it had poisoned the ground water, Orica has finally been ordered by the NSW Government to clean up the mess. This $167 million water treatment plant has started pumping the contaminated water out of the ground and purifying it.
MARIANN LLOYD-SMITH: I don't believe they can stop the contamination. It's moving at a very rapid rate. It is a huge plume. It covers at least a couple of square kilometres. I think it would be very, very optimistic to say that at this late stage they could stop that plume completely from arriving at the bay.
GRAEME RICHARDSON: Orica is committed to finding that solution. We have developed that solution. In the last 12 months, we have constructed an amazingly complex ground water treatment plant.
TARA BROWN: Can you sit here today and give us 100 percent guarantee that the most toxic part of that plume won't reach Botany Bay?
GRAEME RICHARDSON: No-one can give 100 percent guarantee, but what I can assure you is that Orica is doing everything possible to ensure that none of that concentrated contamination will reach Botany Bay.
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