TOM DOIG
Penguin, 2015, 121 pages (pb)
Coal burns, so it is no surprise that coalmines can catch
fire in a spectacular, Hades kind of way.
The massive, open-cut coalmine next to Hazelwood Power Station in
Morwell, Victoria, says the writer, Tom Doig, in The Coal Face, has around three hundred spot fires every year,
punctuated by bigger blazes lasting days.
In 2014, on the extreme fire risk weekend of February
8th-9th, the mine caught dramatically alight (from either bushfires, or a
pre-existing spot fire) and burned out of control for 45 days. The residents of
Morwell, and the broader Latrobe Valley, breathed choking smoke and harmful
chemicals in what was Victoria’s worst ever industrial disaster. It had, however, been preventable, thus
turning a public health emergency into a
corporate crime.
With Hazelwood’s shrinking coal reserves becoming
increasingly uneconomic to mine, thus slating the mine and power plant for
future closure, millions of dollars of fire-suppressant sprinklers and steel
water pipes had been removed and sold for scrap. Fire-preventing rehabilitation and in-fill of
the worked-out but still coal-laden seams had not been done. There had been no clearing of
firebreaks. All this saved money for the
mine’s French multinational owner, GDF Suez, the largest power company in the
world with annual profits of over $100 billion.
GDF Suez didn’t get this big by being ethical. All the water and fire-fighting defences at
Hazelwood had been concentrated on protecting the operational area of the mine
and the power plant, not on protecting the community. These priorities proved highly profitable –
whilst 90% of electricity production was lost for the first 24 hours, it was money-making
“business as usual” for the next 44 days of the fire.
For the people of the Latrobe Valley, however, it meant a
continual chemical soup of microscopic particulate matter, noxious gases, toxic
heavy metals, and carcinogens and mutagens. “Already home to some of the least
healthy people in Victoria” from the background air pollution from coal mining,
many of the region’s residents were pushed closer to, and some over, the mortality
edge with at least eleven immediate probable deaths and widespread short and
long-term serious morbidity.
They weren’t content, however, to be just victims. They organised, attracting over a thousand
residents to Morwell’s “first ever mass community protest”, led, often enough,
by people discovering their political voice for the very first time. They ran a candidate in the state election,
taking 11% of the vote away from the government incumbent and forcing the incoming
Labor Premier to promise and deliver on a thorough scientific investigation of
the fire’s health impact.
With the fire still smouldering and a future public health tragedy
slowly brewing, with employees still banned from speaking out under threat of
dismissal and a firefighting cost to the Victorian taxpayer of $32 million,
Doig’s little book shows that, once again, coal has proven to be good, not for
humanity, but only for corporate wealth and power.
No comments:
Post a Comment