Marine park threat

North West Cape is a remote finger of land in north-western Australia. The Exmouth Gulf and a number of islands lie on its eastern side, while Ningaloo Reef and Cape Range National Park occupy the western shore, where the coastal waters form Ningaloo Marine Park. Much of the area is on the register of the national estate. BHP Petroleum's application for wide exploration drilling in this area includes a consultative environmental review (CER) open to public comment, prepared by the company under West Australian law. According to Naomi Segal, co-author of a Greenpeace report on the review, BHPP's document fails to address so many important environmental issues that it could be open to legal challenge if it is dutifully rubber-stamped by the government. Although drilling will not take place within the park, Segal says the likelihood of severe impact from adjacent activities cannot be eliminated. The Greenpeace report says "the ... area is one in which tidal currents are largely unpredictable, raising serious questions about the usefulness of any oil spill trajectory modelling, including that of the CER ... "BHP would know only too well, most recently through the Iron Baron disaster, the disastrous environmental effects of oil spills, especially in sensitive marine habitats, as well as the ineffectualness of existing clean-up technology and emergency response." The report highlights that base data about the area's biota is woefully inadequate and that the CER implies that elements of the marine environment are expendable. "In the face of such fundamental uncertainty, an assumption that the environment can assimilate the impacts from BHP's exploration drilling has to be in the main no more than idle speculation", it says. Greenpeace points out additional inadequacies in the CER, including incorrect or incomplete information, the neglect to acknowledge or discuss the impact of support vessels, anchor damage, toxicity and impacts of drilling fluids, other chemical spills, sewage discharges and artificial light sources. The CER fails to address key issues identified by the Department for Environmental Protection including cyclone precautions, work force accommodation, details of the onshore operations base, and impact on prawn fisheries.