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The Forum > General Discussion > Flames of Hell

Flames of Hell

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Last Sunday night, the Department of Environment and Conservation in WA allowed a convoy of unescorted trucks to leave the town of Coolgardie, despite a warning from the Bureau of Meterology of significant wind changes affecting the direction of wild bush fires.

Three men perished, 2 in one truck and one in another.

Four trucks were destroyed while 11 others were able to flee to safety.

One truck carrying chemicals blew up, as did a truck carrying explosives.

Coronial enquiries will no doubt see the usual duck-shoving of responsibility, however, the environmental section of the DEC has a history of mismanagement.

In 2001, the Bellevue chemical fire occurred in WA, the largest in Australia's history. Despite the parliamentary enquiry and its recommendations for more efficient regulations to protect the environment and the public, no improvements have been made and the hazardous underground plume from the Bellevue fire is heading towards the Swan river.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s436839.htm

Only this year another parliamentary enquiry was conducted to determine why, under the regulation of DEC, the town of Esperance and some of its citizens were contaminated with lead from a mining company. Some 8,000 native birds, also contaminated, fell from the skies.

Despite many community appeals, other disastrous accidents are waiting to happen, all under the management of this department's senior bureaucrats whose discretionary powers are clearly excessive.

This is the department charged with protecting community health and our already fragile environment.

Those who survived the horrors of the Sunday inferno will require many answers, however, to whom now can they and the citizens of WA, place their trust?
Posted by dickie, Wednesday, 2 January 2008 11:03:21 AM
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Thanks, dickie for an interesting forum article.

Has the the WA Department of the Environment and Conservation always been this way or is a development of more recent years?
Posted by cacofonix, Thursday, 3 January 2008 9:41:36 AM
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Hi Cacofonix

I believe this department has failed in its responsibilities for many years. I did post a long history for you and then lost the lot!!

Here are some links you may be interested in and while the modern day Neros fiddle, Rome is burning. However the same players remain at the helm feeding spin to Ministers (with inappropriate backgrounds) who depend on their "expert" opinions. Then you have Ministers and bureaucrats who are captured by pollutant industries and their lobbyists:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20879342-2702,00.html

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,20702573-2761,00.html

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2004/03/23/1071910.htm

http://202.6.74.101/news/stories/2007/09/06/2025843.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/wa/content/2006/s2053617.htm

http://wa.greens.org.au/items/Media_Release.2003-03-21.5632/view

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:RRe9rnNjuYcJ:www.sprol.com/%3Fp%3D323+kwinana+pollution&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au&lr=lang_en

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:JtZ1m6c77m8J:www.savingiceland.org/node/928+yarloop+contamination&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=au&lr=lang_en

Sorry, perhaps too much information?

Tragically Cacofonix, we see yet again that the only and most unfortunate difference between WA's fearless environmental regulator/manager and the Keystone Cops is that the latter were fictional.

Cheers
Posted by dickie, Friday, 4 January 2008 12:17:24 AM
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dickie,

Thanks for the further information. It was said to hear that you lost the history before you posted it. It's happened to me before too. Now, I usually compose longer posts in a text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windoze or kwrite, kate, gedit or nedit on Linux) before posting, as recommended by OLO.

It is interesting that there seem to be so many dark sides to Western Australia's booming economy which are not discussed: housing hyper-inflation, water shortages, threatened power blackouts (see http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/03/2130995.htm), not to mention what economies such as China's, fed by WA's mineral exports, are doing to the world's ecology.

You should consider setting up a web site to post this material. It would be an immensely useful resource.

For example it is free to set up website on http://www.wikispaces.com (e.g. http://toxicwesternaustralia.wikispaces.com or http://toxicwa.wikispaces.com) and easy to use. Another is wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com).

I am sure that a friend who posts as daggett(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/user.asp?id=2360), would be most interested in having this kind of material posted to his website http://candobetter.org, say within http://candobetter.org/ToxicWesternAustralia

You should be able to reach him if you look at his home page at http://candobetter.org/james
Posted by cacofonix, Friday, 4 January 2008 8:33:38 AM
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cacofonix/daggett/olduvai/et al: "I am sure that a friend who posts as daggett..."

Cute, James.
Posted by CJ Morgan, Friday, 4 January 2008 9:58:56 AM
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What a surprise to learn that CJ Morgan has been watching cacofonix's activities on OLO, with an eagle eye!

No doubt dickie will agree that the concerns he has raised here and to which 'cacofonix' (or 'daggett' if CJ Morgan insists) has responded, of immeasurably less importance than CJ Morgan's allegation.

Let's spend the next three months arguing over this shall we (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#97663), rather than getting on with the task of trying to change the appalling situation in WA to which dickie has drawn our attention?

(Dickie, I suggest you ignore this idiot. If it's true, so what?)
Posted by cacofonix, Friday, 4 January 2008 11:05:17 AM
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