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Tough times in Fullerton Cove

The New South Wales Department of Primary Industries has banned all forms of fishing in Fullerton Cove following the discovery of a suspected carcinogen, perfluorooctane sulfonate, in prawns and fish. This is the story of some affected locals.

The little trawler Babette was built for days like this. Heavy rain has flushed big schools of prawns from the upper reaches of the Hunter River estuary, triggering their migration to the coast. They have amassed in Fullerton Cove, where the river takes a final bite of the land before unwinding into the sea at the port of Newcastle.

On a day like today, Kevin Radnidge should also be on the water, steering the Babette downstream. To cast off before dawn and ride the brown curve of water through the city’s industrial heart; manoeuvre the flat-bottomed trawler into the broad, shallow cove and net the channels between its glistening mudbanks; bring up a valuable haul of sweet, translucent school prawns before the sun starts to sting.

Not this year. The NSW Department of Primary Industries has banned all forms of fishing in Fullerton Cove following the discovery last September of a suspected carcinogen, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), in prawns and fish. Radnidge and 23 other operators – family businesses mostly – have pre-empted a wider ban by agreeing to close the whole river to prawn trawling. “We don’t want to sell seafood that might make people sick and damage the Hunter brand even further,” says Radnidge, the local president of the Wild Caught Fishers Coalition.

Samantha Kelly holds her baby William beside one of the drains running from the Williamtown RAAF base near Newcastle. Photo: Nic Walker

Also idle are the vessels of another 20 or so operators who live by netting fish and trapping crabs. They can’t turn a profit without Fullerton Cove, which yields as much as 80 per cent of all Hunter seafood.

The loss of the entire November to June prawn season spells financial ruin for Radnidge, 57, who quit a job down the mines and outlaid $100,000, his life savings, to buy into Hunter prawning two years ago. With the Babette, he intended to build a profitable business to finance his retirement. Now he depends on Centrelink for a fortnightly dole payment discounted by his wife Jill’s income as a part-time receptionist.

“It’s a kick in the guts,” he says. “I’ve never been so broke in my life. I’m really struggling financially and emotionally.”

Third-generation Hunter fisherman John Hewitt and his partner, Chantel Walker, who has become a spokeswoman for fisherman in the area. Photo: Nic Walker

The ban is in force until the end of June but some believe it will never be lifted. “This is bloody scary. I expect they will close this river permanently, like Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay,” says Geoff Hyde, a nimble 79-year-old who has fished the Hunter professionally since he was 15. That would leave only two NSW rivers open to commercial prawning: the Hawkesbury and the Clarence.

Climbing aboard his trawler The Hod, tied up at Stockton Prawners’ Club, in sight of Newcastle port’s giant coal loaders, Hyde says he wants to keep working “until I kick the bucket”. But with no income since June, he and his wife Pat are receiving charity food vouchers.

PFOS has been detected at “concerning levels” in Hunter prawns and fish, says the NSW chief scientist, Professor Mary O’Kane, who heads an expert panel studying the contamination. The panel warns that big eaters of seafood, such as fishing families, risk exceeding a “tolerable daily intake” of PFOS (test results do not present a “significant” risk to the “average consumer”, however).

Geoff Hyde, Kevin Radnidge, Phil Blanch and John Hewitt at the Stockton Prawners’ Club on the mouth of the Hunter River. Photo: Nic Walker

Williamtown RAAF base, three kilometres north of Fullerton Cove, is the source of the contamination. For more than 40 years until 2011, the base used a fire-fighting foam called aqueous film-forming foam that contained PFOS and other toxic perfluorinated compounds (PFCs).

During fire drills and training exercises, ground crew sprayed the foam from fire trucks and automated systems built into hangars. Wastewater seeped into the ground or collected in man-made Lake Cochran, an unlined evaporation pond the size of 30 Olympic swimming pools.

Few Australians know of PFOS and its sister compound perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). We will soon hear a lot more about them. Civil airports, metropolitan and rural fire services, oil refineries and big fuel storage depots also used foams containing these chemicals. Environment agencies in at least three states – NSW, Victoria and Queensland – are investigating their legacy while PFOS has been linked to unusually high rates of skin, testicular and brain cancer at the Country Fire Authority’s Fiskville training base in western Victoria. PFC contamination is confirmed or suspected at 15 RAAF and other military sites across Australia (see box on page 14).

Kim-Leanne King, with her youngest daughter Madeline and their Appaloosa horses, worries she exposed her children to poison. Photo: Nic Walker

In the case of Williamtown – a picture perfect expanse of small cattle and dairy farms, modest cottages on wide blocks, and saltmarsh dividing rich pasture from mangroves – its geology has helped spread the chemicals. The base sits on sandy soil above a shallow water table that rises after rain and draws down contaminants as it falls. Tasteless and odourless, PFCs have polluted bores of nearby properties and entered the Tomago sandbeds, a giant aquifer that provides about 20 per cent of the lower Hunter’s drinking water. Surface runoff has drained into Fullerton Cove, which is part of an internationally designated wetlands refuge for migratory shorebirds.

The Department of Defence and NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) have known for almost four years that noxious chemicals in fire-fighting foam were spreading out from the base – but only told the public last September. Community health was compromised while Defence and the EPA dallied and disagreed. Since the announcement, livelihoods have been lost and homes rendered worthless. Residents, fearful they may have been drinking poisoned bore water for years, refuse to use the official dispassionate term “investigation zone” to describe the contaminated area. They call it the “red zone”.

‘NSW Health was saying “breast is best” 
while advising residents not to drink milk’ 

Fisherman Kevin Radnidge at the Stockton Prawners Club. Photo: Nic Walker

Samantha Kelly had lived in the red zone for two-and-a-half years when news of the contamination broke in September. She was pregnant with her first child. Would she risk her baby’s health by breastfeeding? “I broke down in tears talking about the situation with my antenatal care team and family and friends,” she says. “NSW Health was saying ‘breast is best’ while advising residents not to drink milk of potentially contaminated animals. But if I’m contaminated, it will be passed to the baby.”

Kelly decided to breastfeed baby William “because there is strong evidence of benefits to the immune system from breast milk. Then there are the unknowns. I still wonder if I’ve done the right thing.” The Risk Assessment Committee of the European Chemicals Agency found enough evidence in 2011 to classify PFOA as “toxic for reproduction” because of its potential to damage the liver and harm the unborn child.

The Kellys bought their house in Cabbage Tree Road, Williamtown in 2013 after several discussions with Port Stephens Council staff about flood risk. “The council knew the area was contaminated before we bought but told us nothing,” Kelly says. “We thought we were buying into a beautiful country lifestyle and a healthy place to raise kids.” Kelly calls Defence’s secrecy “disgusting and negligent”. The state Labor MP for Port Stephens, Kate Washington, says red zone residents feel betrayed and wonder who in authority they can trust.

The line on the map marking the red zone has now been extended beyond its original boundary to encircle 430 households, as counted by the EPA. This group of households includes 165 families who drink bottled water supplied by the RAAF while they wait for town water connections to replace their condemned bores. Tainted water still escapes from the base and Defence admits it does not know how to stop it.

NSW Health advises Williamtown residents it is not known if PFOS and PFOA can harm humans, though “the potential for adverse health outcomes cannot be excluded”. Authorities overseas are less equivocal. The United States Environmental Protection Agency classified both chemicals as “emerging contaminants” after its Science Advisory Board assessed them as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans”. The Review Committee of the Stockholm Convention – an international treaty that aims to eliminate or restrict persistent organic pollutants – concluded that “global action is warranted”. PFOS was added to the Convention in 2009 but Australia has yet to ratify its listing. While the manufacture of PFOS has largely been phased out, PFOA is still produced, including for Teflon, the polymer used in non-stick cookware. Convention experts are considering whether to add PFOA to the treaty list.

Last October, a Williamtown resident asked NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon to find out when the Defence Department first knew the base was contaminated. She got a chance to question Defence officials at a budget estimates hearing in Canberra later that month. “Their answers were evasive but Defence clearly knew about the dangers of these chemicals many years before they took action,” she observes. At Williamtown, Rhiannon met a group of about 20 worried locals: “farmers, young couples, wives of fishermen. I was shocked by their treatment and the anguish Defence was putting them through.” She successfully pressed for an inquiry by the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee. She tells Good Weekend that Defence has “refused to engage with people to work out how they can get their lives back together. They haven’t done much more than hand out bottles of water.”

The committee’s report in February described the contamination as “a slow-moving disaster” and criticised the response of government agencies, particularly Defence. Rhiannon calls it a “grave regulatory failure by all levels of government, with Defence’s response passive at best”. This is arguably a generous assessment, given that the department sought to silence and frustrate the work of agencies charged with protecting public health. Moreover, it repeatedly failed to tell Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Works about PFC contamination, while seeking approval for $900 million to upgrade the base before the air force’s latest weapon, the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, is delivered in 2018.

Kathryn and Bob Cram moved to a small farm about seven kilometres from Williamtown RAAF base in the 1970s. They grew their own meat, milk and eggs from animals watered from bores and grazed on natural pasture. During the 1980s, Kathryn suffered two full-term stillbirths of a son and daughter. “We have spent our lives wondering why. Perhaps we now have the answer,” she says. She worries for the health of “the beautiful son we did have”, now 32, and his wife and daughter. “They ate our produce and swam in our pool filled with bore water. My granddaughter played under the sprinkler. Were we putting her in danger?” Defence told the Crams their bores and tanks tested negative for PFCs but it had found PFOA in their swimming pool filled from the same bores.

The RAAF knew as early as 2003 that PFOS and PFOA were suspected to cause cancer and may have spread to properties neighbouring Williamtown base. It took them a further eight years to act on the advice of their own experts to start testing for contamination. By 2012 the RAAF had proof the chemicals were washing out of the base in surface water. It informed the EPA, Hunter Water and Port Stephens Council but insisted on confidentiality.

Hunter Water, which supplies half a million people in the lower Hunter, embargoed three of its pumping stations to stop groundwater contamination reaching its bores. The state-owned company says it will seek compensation “in the order of tens of millions of dollars” for having to bring forward capital works to replace lost borelines.

EPA staff became increasingly agitated as Defence brushed aside their suggestions for co-ordinated action. The EPA’s lack of legal authority over Defence land “stymied the ability of EPA officers to act decisively and in a timely fashion” but should not have stopped them sampling water, soil and livestock outside the base, concluded Professor Mark Taylor of Macquarie University in a report for NSW Environment Minister Mark Speakman.

The EPA finally overrode Defence secrecy by issuing a media release on September 3, 2015 – more than three years after Defence told it that toxic chemicals were moving off base. The release, which made national news, warned stunned locals not to drink bore water and not to eat eggs from backyard chickens or fish caught nearby. Defence told the EPA its news release was premature. Were it a corporation, Defence would face a fine of up to $1 million for failing to notify contamination as required under state law.

‘They don’t care. We’re dogs to them’

KIM-LEANNE KING found her father crawling along the hallway in tears after bowel cancer spread to his bones. Les Facer was a RAAF corporal at Williamtown who lived about 200 metres from Lake Cochran until his death 10 years ago. “He was a strong country boy who carried strainer posts on his shoulders. He wasted away to nothing in a hospital bed,” King recalls. The cancer’s highly aggressive behaviour and the absence of any genetic predisposition to bowel cancer among family members led doctors to believe the cause was environmental, she says.

Kim-Leanne and her husband, Colin, built their home next door to Les’s block, where her mother, Ruth, still lives. A drain from the base runs through both properties and exacerbates local flooding. Cancer has killed two of Kim-Leanne’s neighbours, a sister is on permanent medication for a thyroid condition and a daughter suffers from severe allergies. PFOS and PFOA are linked to thyroid and immune disorders. They can persist in soil and water for “perhaps hundreds of years”, a Defence environmental health consultant, Dr Ian Gardner, told the Senate inquiry.

A surface water test on King’s block showed a PFOS reading of 38.2 micrograms per litre – almost 200 times the 0.2 threshold level set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. “My sister and I used to play in drains and ponds around here,” she says. “I was pregnant with my youngest daughter [Madeline] when we built this house; I helped Colin dig the foundations. I lie in bed at night wondering, ‘What have I done to contaminate myself today? Did I expose my children to this poison?’ “

Two weeks after the EPA’s September announcement, authorities faced more than 300 residents who filled the auditorium of Stockton RSL club. A Defence representative told them the department kept quiet because it did not know enough about the extent of contamination, local media reported. His claim that the department had been “working closely” with the EPA and Hunter Water since 2012 was clearly wrong.

EVERY FRIDAY, an email reaches the inbox of a Defence Department employee. Chantel Walker tells the unknown bureaucrat how she and her husband John Hewitt, a third generation Hunter fisherman, are faring. “It’s been 18 weeks of no income. John and I relied on the Salvation Army for gifts for our two young children and food vouchers,” she wrote soon after Christmas. “I’m greatly concerned about John’s health and wellbeing … watching him depressed, stressed and feeling worthless. It is the first year he has not been able to provide for his family and this was very upsetting.” Walker does not know if anyone reads her emails because she has never received a reply.

Hewitt, 35, has fished since he left school at 15. With the Hunter off-limits, he tows his boat 100 kilometres to Myall Lake to trap eels. His catch barely covers the cost of fuel and, though he is endorsed to fish the lake, he’s infringing on someone else’s patch. “I’ve already had two blues with locals who see me taking money off them,” he says.

Hewitt gruffly dismisses government expressions of concern. “They don’t care. We’re dogs to them,” he says, as if unwilling to waste breath on his tormentors. He drives to the harbour entrance and sits on the breakwall to watch big trawlers scooping up prawns in Stockton Bight. No ban applies to the ocean fishery even though its catch is swollen with potentially contaminated Hunter prawns that have moved out to sea to spawn. “The big boats out there are absolutely killing it,” he says.

The Hunter fishery is strictly regulated to ensure sustainable catches. The fishermen see themselves as exercising a stewardship over a river reshaped for flood mitigation and trashed by industry. “Big companies and the Defence Department get away with using the Hunter as a bucket to tip their waste into,” says Phil Blanch, a third-generation Hunter fisherman who lives in the red zone. “It’s an absolute disgrace that the RAAF are exempt from environmental regulations. They have put a lot of lives in danger.”

Blanch says he is deeply worried for his daughter, 12, raised at Fullerton Cove. “Is it going to be like asbestos, that catches up with people in 20 years’ time?” Blanch also knows he can’t sell up and move because his home may be worthless. At least one red zone property, with a home and dog boarding kennel business, has been valued at “absolute zero” because it would never find a buyer, according to a local press report.

Walker and Lucinda Hornby, wife of Phil Blanch, helped 20 fishermen without computer skills, and including some barely literate, write submissions to the Senate inquiry. “Three of them told me they would rather take their lives than live like they do,” Walker says. NSW Health opened a weekly half-day mental health clinic for fishing families and residents five months after the contamination was revealed.

Part of a delegation to Canberra, Walker broke down and cried in a meeting with the then Assistant Defence Minister Darren Chester. “He wasn’t aware of how serious our situation was and came across as caring and concerned. He said he wanted action,” she recalls. “But we have had no help from his office and we only get form letters from Marise Payne, the Defence Minister.”

The federal government has yet to commit to Senate committee recommendations such as voluntary property acquisitions and fishing licence buyouts. Kevin Radnidge says all fishermen would prefer a reopened river over buyouts. However “the RAAF has stolen our ability to make a living” and Hunter estuary prawn shares are not transferable to other fisheries.

The EPA affirms the “polluter pays” principle; its chief executive, Barry Buffier, is adamant that “Defence is the polluter in this case.” Defence insists it is “too early for a formal acceptance of liability.” It is no doubt apprehensive of the big picture that will likely come into focus, layer by layer, as the Senate investigation moves around the country. Kate Washington says Defence’s attitude is clearly dictated by legal advice. “I am a lawyer and I can smell them a mile away,” she told the inquiry.

Williamtown residents had the advantage of community structures with experienced campaigners to fight their corner when the contamination scandal broke. Action groups had already seen off a coal seam gas project at Fullerton Cove and were resisting a sand mine proposed for a koala habitat close to the RAAF base. Rhianna Gorfine, convenor of the Williamtown and Surrounds Resident Action Group, lives 2km from the base with her husband, Cain, and three children aged 18 months to nine years. She is working with lawyers and litigation funders on a class action. “No one in authority can say whether we are at the start, middle or end of the contamination,” she says. “And no one seems to know how to stop more contamination leaving the base.”

Defence told the inquiry large-scale remediation of ground water was “problematic”, there was no proven way of effectively remediating the aquifer, and the topography and high water table “present challenges” for containing surface water run off.

None of this has prevented a major clean up of the RAAF base itself, however. The air force is spending $3 million to treat water and stockpile contaminated soil before extending the runway for the F-35A fighter. Residents worry the work could spread PFCs even further. “They are digging and pumping groundwater in the heart of the contamination zone,” Gorfine says. “There is no regulatory body overseeing the work because Defence are a law unto themselves.”

‘No bank will lend to a Hunter fisherman’

THE BABETTE, a 30-footer painted a cheerful sky-blue and white, is berthed with other trawlers along a mangrove-fringed stretch of river 15 kilometres from the sea. The only fishing is done by a wading heron stabbing through its watery reflection. “The authorities all knew about the contamination when I bought the boat, but I never knew,” says Radnidge, with a hint of needless self-reproach.

Radnidge was hopeful when the federal government announced a “business hardship package” of up to $20,000 for affected fishermen – a fraction of their losses. He applied to use it to refit the Babette and buy an endorsement for coastal prawning, but Centrelink knocked him back. “It would have got me off my arse and earning money but they told me it wasn’t designed to help start a new business.” Even if it were, Radnidge would have to spend first then claim reimbursement from Centrelink. “But I’m broke and I can’t borrow because no bank will lend to a Hunter fisherman,” he says.

Government aid to fishermen took too long to be made available, and when it came it was inadequate, difficult to access and demeaning, Kate Washington told the Senate inquiry. Newstart payments will cut out when the prawning season ends in June. Radnidge says that ignores the “really hard, really long hours we work for seven months to make our 12 months’ income. How are we supposed to survive after June?”

Radnidge doesn’t sleep much anymore. He spends his days on the phone to other anxious fishermen and is awake all night worrying: “I’ve got a real good family unit around me … my sons are my best mates. But I’m still battling with the emotion of it all.”

He fears he will never again experience the contentment of guiding the Babette downstream at daybreak to meet the tide. “I love fishing; we all do. And now it’s been taken away – maybe forever.” says. 

TOXIC SPREAD

Williamtown’s contamination has grabbed headlines but toxic fallout from fire-fighting foam used on military bases is a nationwide threat.

The Department of Defence is testing another 15 “priority” sites confirmed or likely to be PFC-contaminated across all states and the Northern Territory. A Senate committee of inquiry is due to report on the issue in April.

Queensland lawyers are already assembling a class action case on behalf of landowners hit by contamination from the Army Aviation Centre near the Darling Downs town of Oakey. Affected residents have recorded blood PFC levels of up to 44 times the national average.

Defence has confirmed PFC contamination at the RAAF’s Townsville base, which drains to the Great Barrier Reef, and at Richmond air force base north of Sydney which has caused fish kills in a creek running into the Hawkesbury River.

In Victoria, Defence has “prioritised” East Sale RAAF base for testing to begin this month.

Fire-fighting chemicals have contaminated Darwin RAAF base, which drains to a suburban creek, and Defence has predicted “significant levels” of contamination at RAAF Base Pearce, which is located next to the town of Bullsbrook north of Perth.