residents confront environment minister, page-4

Bunya,

I wrote a letter to the editor of a major newspaper 2 weeks ago. I thanked a reporter for reporting the facts as opposed to hysteria in a report he had done on Kingaroy. I said that Cougar had been shut down due to a testing flaw of DERM's, 21 jobs lost and that water was within drinking standards and no contamination existed. Also, an opportunity to provide cleaner cheaper power looks to be lost to Qld and a federal election just happens to be around the corner.

A reply was published by a farmer stating that if my livelihood relied on reliable clean underground water I would not regard the reporting by some newspapers as hysteria and that there was no 'leaching/contamination' before the burn. The leaching was due to an equipment failure and occured after only 4 days of burning.

The farmers of Kingaroy understandably are concerned that there water supply is in grave danger of being contaminated. 1 PPB, 2PPB, 1000 PPB is irrelevant to them. They have been fed a load of rubbish by KCCG and others, and fear their main assett (farm) will lose value if a catastrophe ever occurs.
They can't really be blamed for their lack of confidence in UCG. This campaign has been carefully orchestrated to undermine CXY and UCG in Kingaroy.

My personal view is that CXY has been ambushed and the Kingaroy project will be put on ice (indefinitely).
It is going to take a massive turnaround to win over the confidence of Kingaroy landholder's to this technology.
It is no use flogging a dead horse. Hopefully Len can pull CXY out of the fire, but my feeling is we are on a hiding to nothing in Kingaroy.

Time to focus elsewhere.