Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Dirty dumps: isn’t it incredible to think that in 2020 we still have waves of brown, creamy, sewage water turning up at Thunder Point from the Wannon Water treatment plant?

The video above, captured by Good Will Nurdle Hunting, was taken from above the outfall pipe off Shelly Beach last Saturday, May 30.

Another gorgeous brown tide was also crashing onto the rocks on Tuesday 26 May.

It also happened on 17 March, which means there have been at least three such “dirty dumps” into the ocean in the past three months.

The reason is that the Wannon Water plant is full to the gills.

It can’t take much more of our gunk – most of which comes from three main industries – and the system is failing more than it should.

The good news – if you could call it that – is that, according to Wannon Water GM Service Delivery Ian Bail, these brown waves haven’t included raw sewage. (ie. We won’t see a cameo appearance of our personal contributions.)

The other good news is that we have a chance to put things right.

The EPA is asking for public feedback on a $40 million upgrade of the treatment plant that will double its capacity – 30 million litres of waste water a day.

Hooray, I thought, we will soon have the best treatment plant possible.

Wrong.

The $40m upgrade will see more of the same technology that is used now.

For the next 20 years we will continue to have a “secondary” treatment system, and not a “tertiary” treatment system.

We will remain stuck in Year 10 at WooBoo High while other towns along our coastline have long moved on to Melbourne University.

How does a “Year 10 system” (as I like to call it) that still shoots shite into the ocean fit with our claim to be a clean, green, cosmopolitan, hydrogen-fuelled-FOGO-climate-change-emergency-aware Warrnambool?

It makes a mockery of that claim.

We can’t just keep saying we want to change the way we do things: we have to actually CHANGE.

But there is a problem.

The cut-off date for us to have a say via the EPA about this treatment plant upgrade is 17 June.

The EPA told me today that this deadline had already been extended by a week because of C19.

A week is not long enough. We need more time.

I don’t know about you, but I still don’t know what day it is and I haven’t been home schooling kids while trying to work, cook, clean the house and keep up with the rates notices.

We need more time to make sure we have our say and to get this absolutely right – to demand more for our coastline – and I hope the EPA agrees.

[You can find more detail on the EPA consultation here.]

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

That is eco-activist Colleen Hughson’s thumb and that is one very clean rock pool at Shelly Beach, near Thunder Point and both are worth a special mention tonight.

I want to acknowledge a small moral victory by Colleen, (who doesn’t know I am writing this, but who is surely one of the most determined people on this planet), and the diligent beach clean up crew who have been pushing for years for Wannon Water to clean up its act.

Ever since zillions of plastic nurdles landed in the ocean via the sewerage system in 2017 by some assbob who has never been held to account, Colleen and other like-minded souls have been pressing Wannon Water to lift its game.

This is because it wasn’t only nurdles, but a whole pile of other gunk that was making its way through the Wannon Water treatment plant and out into the ocean.

Cotton buds, tossed down the toilet by other, unthinking assbobs, are one major offender.

Another is a delightful thing called a fatberg, which is a stinky, smelly, fatty, hairy blob that forms in the scum of the Wannon Water treatment plant and – if not caught – ends up floating in the rockpools of Shelly Beach.

The Pick Up Sticks and Good Will Nurdle Hunting crew knew this stuff must have been coming via Wannon Water, but Wannon Water ducked and weaved and pretty much denied it was doing anything other than an exemplary job at catching the smelly gunk before it was flushed out to sea.

Wannon Water’s take on it was that fatbergs and any other gunk showing up at Shelly Beach must have been from elsewhere or it was “old” stuff being flushed back to shore. (Spin, rinse, repeat).

Rarely did their screening system fail, they said, when I toured the plant last October.

Except Colleen and the beach clean-up crew knew it was failing.

They could see the screens failed when they became completely blocked and overflowed (just like any sieve or kitchen drain).

And it failed every time the two screens, including a fine screen, had to each be taken out manually, scraped into a wheelbarrow or vacuumed, and put back again.

How such a clunky system involving a wheelbarrow and a vacuum cleaner was ever considered good enough in the 21st century is beyond me, but it was, for years and years.

After the nurdle spill in November 2017, Wannon Water announced plans to improve the screening system as part of its plant upgrade, but these changes were slow in coming.

A second, manual fine screen was finally added earlier this year, and a fully automated, $1.1 million screen was installed in April …. and no wonder.

Because what happened in between times was a big, fat pollution abatement notice was issued to Wannon Water by the EPA in February.

This notice confirmed what was always suspected: the manual screens were not always doing their job.

In fact when the EPA visited the treatment plant last November, the screens were 100% blocked and effluent, it said, may have flowed over the top.

Whats more, the EPA went back to the plant in January this year and actually saw the effluent overtopping the screens.

Not only that, the EPA visited the rock pools at Shelly Beach that same day and, guess what?

They found five fat balls and many smaller pieces of fat in just one rockpool: slam dunk proof of a failing system.

This is a story that I wanted to write two months ago, but it got bumped in the Covid 19 news whirl.

But it’s an important vindication of the hard work and pressure and activism by Colleen and the dozens of other activists who form the clean up crews: they were right all along, and now the EPA notice proved it.

The EPA notice ordered Wannon Water to fix its screening system by no later than 15 June this year, which it has done, and the Shelly Beach rockpools are the cleanest they have been in years.

There is no doubt in my mind that the sustained pressure of Colleen and the beach clean up crew has helped this to happen.

And yet, even now, Wannon Water can’t quite bring itself to say just that.

“The manual screening system, installed in November 2017, has performed extremely well and has been very effective,” managing director Andrew Jeffers said to me via email.

No, actually, it didn’t perform “extremely well” and it should have been improved years ago.

The fight to clean up our beaches from plastics and pollution goes on, but the small victories and vindications are worth celebrating and so, as Rod Stewart would say, tonight’s the night.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Welcome to The Terrier Sunday Night Tidbits in easy-to-digest, meaty morsels:

1. Shelly beach is less stinky: the indefatigable Colleen Hughson and the whole Good Will Nurdle Hunting and Pick Up Sticks crew are reporting that the rockpools at Shelly Beach, near Thunder Point, are cleaner than they have been in years since another fine mesh screen was installed at the Wannon Water treatment plant in February.

I had almost forgotten what a crystal clear rockpool at Shelly Beach looked like, but things are set to get even better.

A fourth, fully automated, $1.1 million screen made in the US is being installed at the plant by Wannon Water as we speak.

By automated, I mean it is the first screen that will clean itself without having to be physically taken out and cleaned by WW staff, which must be a shitty job, to say the least.

If the rockpools are looking good now, hopefully they will soon be sparkling permanently.

A big, non-algae blooming bouquet to everyone involved in making this happen. I will write more about this whole water pollution saga soon.

2. Big fat rate rise on hold: The W’bool City Council has decided, because we are in very tough times, against raising rates by 4.5% again this year, which it was allowed to do after getting approval last year to break the rate cap for two years in a row.

This means rates will go up by 2%.

But before we stand and cheer, the rate pain is not over yet.

The council is still very keen to slap that 4.5% rise into place next year because, it says, it still needs the money to fix its assets.

From what I am reading, it’s going to take a couple of years at least for most businesses to get back on their feet after the crush of C19.

We have said this many times before, but surely more savings have to come from within rather than jacking up rates by 4.5% at a time when ratepayers will still be doing it very, very tough.

3. Borrowing more big bucks: Speaking of which, I see in the agenda for tomorrow night’s council meeting that the WCC plans to borrow $3 million for its share of Reid Oval, $2.5 million for its share of the new library at TAFE and another $3 million to restore and upgrade the old library space when it moves out.

What are the plans for this old library space that warrants a $3 million loan?

Please, please don’t tell me the council intends to spread out and use the old library for more office space?

If they do, then I want our old Post Office building back.

I would love to see it open to the public as an art space, communal space, cafe…anything but offices.

The fact this beautiful old building – one of the best in Warrnambool – is shut off to the public is a travesty and all you can see through the glazed windows are phone books and shadows.

4. Another resignation: Speaking of Reid Oval, the project officer for this $11 million project, Mel Starr, has resigned and taken up a job in Melbourne where – according to an email she sent to various sporting clubs – she can be closer to family.

As far as we know, nobody has been announced as a replacement, so perhaps one of the existing WCC managers will pick up the role at this crucial stage.

By the way, can anybody tell me if this Reid Oval upgrade, as it stands, will be enough to host AFL practice matches as we had hoped?

Or will more upgrades need to follow? I have been told it is the latter but haven’t been able to follow this up this weekend.

5. Cutting up the credit cards: And last but not least for tonight’s tidbits, the council agenda confirms credit card use is way down.

The number of transactions fell from 6757 in 2018-19 to 4139 so far in 2019-20.

Ombudsman Deborah Glass was on ABC statewide radio last Wednesday and said the investigation into the council’s credit card use was still ongoing. No release date for the final report has been given.

And that, terriers, is tonight’s tidbits.  (The council will live stream its meeting tomorrow night at 5.45pm.)

[This is the C19 version of The Terrier : short, sharp and shiny posts straight to Facebook rather than longer, in-depth pieces to unearth where the truth bones are buried. Rest assured those pieces are simmering along behind the scenes.]

By Carol Altmann

Every time I look at the above photo of Warrnambool woman Colleen Hughson, I am struck by the humility of it.

There is Colleen, at Shelly Beach, on her knees, deeply focussed, picking up tiny plastic beads – aka an environmental nightmare called “nurdles” – between her fingertips, one by one by one by one….the number appears to be endless.

That shaved spot you can see above her right ear was where she had surgery to remove a brain tumour not long before this photo was taken by fellow ‘nurdler’ Rosana Sialong*.

I am sure surviving a brain tumour must change you. It would make some of us, I suspect, become more selfish. In Colleen’s case, however, it has made her generous spirit even more generous.

When Colleen, a film maker, discovered that tens of thousands of nurdles had been illegally dumped through the local Wannon Water sewerage system last November, she started a community action and clean-up group, Good Will Nurdle Hunting, that is still going gangbusters today.

Colleen and Rosana and dozens of others have now been cleaning up this plastic pollution for months, including days of blazing heat and finger-freezing cold.

So far, they have picked up more than 650,000 nurdles from our local beaches and it ain’t over yet. They just keep coming.

Wannon Water has also been cleaning up this mess for months.

It recently announced it had so far spent $334,000 on collecting nurdles: imagine the cost if Good Will Nurdle Hunting was not helping out for free? It would probably be at least $500,000.

What happened here was a major environmental crime.

A crime that is equivalent to someone stealing half a million bucks from a bank, except unfortunately crimes against the environment are not measured that way.

And yet nobody has been held responsible and nobody will because Wannon Water, despite its best efforts, has run out of leads.

I asked Wannon Water’s general manager (service delivery) Ian Bail a bunch of questions about where the investigation was up to and, in a nutshell, this is what he said:

• 20 sites have been visited. There are no more visits to come;
• the nurdles have been inspected by two independent labs and they still don’t know what specific type of plastic it is or what it might be used for;
• investigator and retired police officer Mick Fennessy, who was hired by Wannon Water, has finished his immediate task;
• the multi-million dollar upgrade to the Warrnambool Sewage Treatment Plant will include a new system for accepting sludge which, hopefully, means this won’t happen again.

Wannon Water is keeping the investigation open. It still hopes for a breakthrough, but that won’t happen unless someone who knows what happened speaks up.

And somebody knows.

The person who poured the zillions of the nurdles into the system knows.

The person who delivered the sludge to Wannon Water’s treatment plant containing all of these zillions of nurdles also knows, or should know.

Was somebody paid to look the other way?

Somebody knows.

And while we wait for somebody to grow a conscience, people like Colleen and Rosana and Keith and Brenda and Donna and Luke and Megan (the list of names goes on), will keep picking up the pieces.

*Rosana’s photo provided the inspiration for this year’s Warrnibald portrait prize winner, Megan Nicolson, who reproduced it in needlepoint.

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By Carol Altmann

LAST November, millions of tiny plastic pellets (nurdles) were dumped illegally into Warrnambool’s sewerage treatment system – polluting our beaches all the way from Thunder Point to Yambuk – and still nobody has been found responsible.

How can this be?

This was a criminal act, but as Bob Brown said recently, crimes against the environment don’t attract police cars with their lights flashing and sirens roaring.

It was also, I suspect, one of the largest pollution spills ever recorded in Warrnambool and one from which it will take months if not years to recover.

Even as I write this, the Good Will Nurdle Hunting action group – set up by film maker Colleen Hughson – and others, are still laboriously picking up thousands of nurdles to avoid them getting stuck in a seabird’s gut and killing them.

And yet five months on, Wannon Water, who is responsible for accepting and treating the waste that comes into the Warrnambool plant, appears no closer to finding a culprit.

In these days of swipe cards, security codes, security cameras, trade waste controls, random testing, checklists, computerised logistics and god knows what else, this seems inconceivable, but it is the current reality.

It is also astonishing that Wannon Water didn’t know exactly what was being poured into its treatment plant on or around November 16.

This might be a harsh assessment if we were talking about the general sewerage system that caters for tens of thousands of customers from across the south-west, including those stupid enough to flush all manner of junk down the loo.

But in this case, the search is not a needle-in-a-haystack scenario, but actually quite narrow.

BEAR with me for a second while I lay this out, because it is critical as to why this spill is considered by many to have been avoidable and why so many people are still angry and demanding answers.

Wannon Water has confirmed that the plastics came into its plant through what is called a Sludge Acceptance Point (SAP). This is where authorised tankers deliver gunk collected from authorised customers. You need a key and a swipe card to get in. In other words, it is not open to just anybody.

As Wannon Water managing director Andrew Jeffers said by email, “Wannon Water’s system is secure and only able to be accessed by approved customers. Volumes received at this point are only a very minor proportion of the total volume of sewage treated at the Warrnambool plant.”

Of these SAP customers, Wannon Water has identified 20 sites that were inspected as part of its investigation, including some sites that might use nurdles or raw plastic.

Yet despite nailing it down to just 20 likely sources, none of these inspections, it seems, has come to anything.

WANNON Water declined to list the 20 sites inspected, or to reveal much of anything about its ongoing investigation, so I asked five local, large industries directly if they had any knowledge of the spill.

Here is what they said:

Midfield Meats: “Midfield doesn’t use nurdles in any processes.”

Murray Goulburn: ‘MG does not use Wannon Water for its effluent disposal. We have our own wastewater treatment system and spray irrigate on to our farmland. In addition, MG does not use a product of this nature in any aspect of its manufacturing.’

Beach Energy: (owners and operators of the Port Campbell gas field, formerly operated by Origin Energy): “No nurdles are used in production on site.”

Fonterra: “I’ve spoken to our site environment manager and can advise that we don’t use nurdles in our production processes”.

Saputo/Warrnambool Cheese and Butter: The questions have been sent to Saputo communications in Canada – still waiting a response.

And what about two of Warrnambool’s septic and trade waste collection services, Berminghams and Sergeants? What do they know?

Sergeants: “As the records would state (we) didn’t dispose of any liquid waste at the Warrnambool facility during the months of October, November or December”.

Berminghams: “We have nothing to tell you about that.” The person said on the end of the phone before ending the call.

Lastly, I called Bartlett’s Environmental in Geelong.

Bartlett’s are contracted to clean the Wannon Water sewer pump stations and truck the sludge to the SAP, so maybe they unknowingly sucked up a load of nurdles around November 16 last year?

At first Barlett’s offered to look into it, and then, a day later, its general manager John McCoy emailed: “For all matters regarding contract work undertaken by Bartlett’s Environmental for Wannon Water, please refer all questions directly to Wannon Water.”

Mr Jeffers, who declined to be interviewed directly for this piece, said via email that Wannon Water had since ruled out the plastics coming in via sludge from a sewer pump station.

So around and around and around we go.

WANNON Water appears keen to find out who has caused it such grief.

It is even using the skills of a private investigator, retired police officer Mick Fennessy, who is a big, no-bullshit kind of guy, to try and flush out the truth.

But what this spill has exposed is not only an environmental vandal in action, but a gaping hole in how the Warrnambool treatment plant has operated – quite legally – to date.

Wannon Water has now realised that its screening systems were not good enough, both before sludge was poured into its plant, and once it passed through.

What has happened since this spill is that two, finer screens have been installed at the treatment plant to catch anything larger than 1.5mm before it reaches the ocean.

Wannon Water is also “now supervising all loads coming in” to the SAP, according to Mr Jeffers.

Both of these are important changes but, some argue, they should have been made immediately when thousands of cotton bud sticks appeared at Shelly Beach en masse in 2015 and turned up in vast numbers again last August.

The slim white sticks were considered to be the canary in the coal mine, sending a highly visual warning that thousands of litres of small plastic could be passing through the Warrnambool treatment plant to the ocean.

Nothing, however, was done, despite Wannon Water being told about the pollution.

“Both the Environmental Protection Authority and Wannon Water were informed by myself and others of the sticks, but they either didn’t believe me or were unwilling to do anything about it,” said Luke Foster, a local plumber and member of Good Will Nurdle Hunting.

If the new 1.5mm screen had been installed before November 16 last year, the argument goes, very few of the millions of dumped nurdles would have made it to the ocean.

“I am happy there is now a 1.5mm screen at the end of the waste water treatment plant to capture these plastics. However, it may be a long time before we are able to remove the majority of plastics that remain in the marine environment from past pollution,” Mr Foster said.

Mr Jeffers, however, has distanced Wannon Water from any responsibility for the cotton bud sticks.

“Wannon Water does not believe the cotton buds were related to the current sewage treatment plant nor the nurdle incident,” he wrote.

THERE is a lot at stake for Wannon Water from this pollution problem, with the EPA continuing its own investigation into potential breaches of the Environment Protection Act by the treatment plant.

As EPA South West manager Carolyn Francis outlined, the maximum penalty through the courts for a breach of an EPA licence is $380,568. The EPA can also directly issue Infringement Notices of $7729.

There is also, of course, the need to reassure the public that Wannon Water is top of its game when it comes to handling pollutants: preventing them from entering the system in the first place and catching them – and the polluters – when they do.

Catching the nurdle culprit so long after the event, however, appears increasingly unlikely and yet time alone, surely, cannot be an excuse to give up the search. We deserve answers.

In the meantime, Colleen Hughson, who really got the ball rolling on the public clean-up, says she has been amazed by the community response.

“The most heartening thing about the nurdles spill is the amount of ‘good will’ the community has shown in coming together to clean the mess up.

“(It) has also highlighted the bigger issue of marine plastic pollution and many people in my community have been inspired to look into ways of curbing their own consumer habits to stop the flow of plastic waste. It’s brought about conversations, generosity and a willingness to take positive action.”

Do you know anything about the illegal dumping of the nurdles? If you do, contact me at altmanncarol@gmail.com

For information on Wannon Water’s response to the nurdle spill, including media releases, clean-up activities and ongoing updates, visit its dedicated webpage here.