By Paul Adams
MELBOURNE — There are many problems with relocating Coode Island's hazardous chemicals facilities to the west side of relatively remote Point Wilson, as recommended by the official investigators. The government is yet to guarantee that there will be no other development in the surrounding area, and there are concerns about the local environment as well as questions about the adequacy of local fire fighting facilities. The final report of the Coode Island Review Panel even included the bizarre suggestion that ownership of the Point Wilson buffer zone could be tendered out to the private sector.
But none of this reduces the problems with the Coode facilities' present location. Among Australia's largest bulk storage facilities, they are situated near one of Melbourne's most densely populated areas, and their chemical contents include thousands of tonnes of extremely dangerous items, some closely related to the methyl isocyanate that was responsible for the Bhopal disaster, in which just 24 tons of chemical killed 3000 people and injured 100,000 others.
Within a kilometre of Coode are 1000 workers in local factories, several thousand residential houses, two primary schools, a kindergarten, office accommodation and the Footscray Community Arts Centre (16,000 visitors a year). The closest house is less than 600 metres away, and the city centre only 4.7 km away.
During the August 23-24, 1991, fires at Coode Island, the Environment Protection Authority advised people to stay indoors, but as the toxic plume spread across the city, shoppers continued to walk about in the open and fumes entered the air-conditioning of many workplaces and department stores.
Predominantly working-class Footscray and other inner-west areas have been a dumping ground for the big chemical companies for many years. Those most at risk from chemical accidents tend to be the poorer sections of the working class, particularly those in high-density public housing in Kensington (within 2 km of Coode). During a leak of toxic gas at the Dynon Road V-Line rail yards in 1990, emergency services took eight hours to evacuate 5000 people, just 10% of the 50,000 potentially at risk in Kensington and Footscray.
Even more serious problems arise due to the fact that chemical production proceeds according to market trends, with little or no consideration for long-term health and safety or environmental sustainability. If chemical companies upgraded outdated equipment, which in many cases is more than 30 years old, they could massively reduce storage at Coode.
Furthermore, many chemicals are by-products of plastics production, 25% of which are used for largely unnecessary packaging. In many cases, technology is also available to replace toxic materials with more environmentally friendly ingredients, but Australian companies are lagging badly in development of clean production techniques.
Australian-owned companies, such as Chemplex and Dunlop, tend to trade mainly in the Pacific Rim, where there is not a high demand for roducts. Most research and development, and development of cleaner technology, is centred in Europe and the United States, though even there production remains subject to the anarchic whims of the capitalist market.
The Labor government was reluctantly forced to pay serious attention to the Coode problem, partly because it threatened its electoral hold in some traditional areas, but also because it affected the nearby Dockland redevelopment project and plans for a casino. Community groups actively informed potential investors in these and other projects of the toxic threat to their expensive real estate ventures, helping to focus the mind of the government, which eventually came down on the side of the developers against the chemical giants.