On April 24, the Locals for Esperance Development (LED) residents' group told the WA south coast town's local council they wanted a complete ban on the shipment through Esperance of lead for nickel to be transported in closed containers, and community consultation about further transportation of heavy metals through the port.
The WA parliamentary inquiry into lead contamination at Esperance's port was told on May 2 that Magellan Mines had never shipped lead through Esperance in the legally required pelletised form. Three months before the first shipment in July 2005, the company simply came to an agreement with the Esperance Port Authority CEO Colin Stewart not to use the equipment that was supposed to reduce dust contamination.
Magellan managing director Patrick Scott told the inquiry that the company had found that the lead pellets had broken down during the 900km trip from the Wiluna mine to Esperance.
Stewart said the port had agreed to continue taking the lead and did not see a need to inform the WA Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) about the change, as it was essentially still a "concentrate" product.
The DEC inspectors — who had twice certified that the port was meeting its licence requirements — had never even entered the lead storage shed, the inquiry was told by DEC deputy director-general for environment Kim Taylor.
The inquiry has been told of widespread contamination of town water tanks, as well as the soil and marine sediment surrounding the port, which has left 28 people with lead levels above the international recommended safe guidelines of 10 micrograms per decilitre.
The WA health department revealed that one in four children tested had recorded lead levels high enough to warrant official inspection of their homes to reduce any further exposure.
Of 239 children tested who fell into the high risk group of five years or younger, 56 recorded levels above 5mcg/dl and six tested above 10mcg/dl.
The Esperance Shire Council has distributed 500 Britta water filtration jugs to residents to clean pollutants out of their tank waters and supposedly make them fit to drink from.
Residents are still report finding dead birds in their gardens. It was the sudden death of some 4000 parrots in December 2005 that first alerted residents that there was a pollution problem.
Residents are now raising concerns about the use of xanthate, the salts and esters of a xanthic acid, thought to be used on nickel stockpiles. The xanthate "is the most obvious thing that we can detect because we smell it", LED activist Ben Curtis told the May 2 Esperance Express. "At the information day at the Civic Centre, one after another, people came up to me saying they had been throwing up, their lungs are congested and they have to leave their homes when they smell the stuff."
The Esperance port was first developed as a grain export facility, WA Conservation Council biodiversity officer Nic Dunlop told Green Left Weekly. "Its town planning was based on that. Now, they have a lot of people living close to operations handling substances that really require buffer zones", he said.
The port diversified to exporting bulk iron ore about 10 years ago and its facilities were upgraded to service large Panamax bulk ore carriers. "Then, in pretty short order, they were allowed to transport nickel, sulphur and then lead without further public environmental assessment", said Dunlop.
The problem, he suspects, is that the ship-loading equipment used for the large Panamax ships is not designed for the smaller ships carrying nickel and lead concentrate. As a consequence these cargoes are exposed to the wind during some ship loading operations.