Climate Defence Tour: The North Island starts
We have started the North Island leg of the country-wide tour with a public meeting in New Plymouth – gas and dairy country. We started off the day doing a stall in town handing out our ‘what you can do about climate change’ pocket guides, then met up with the local paper and had an explore of the local surrounds. We climbed to the top of Paritutu rock (no mean feet) and had an amazing view of Taranaki and a not-so-beautiful view of the gas-powered power station (Russel pictured) on one side and the Ivan Watkins Dow chemical plant on the other. The power station runs on gas from the offshore fields and is the second largest in the country though because of its age and inefficient steam technology is mostly used as reserve capacity. The station’s 198 meter chimney is one of the tallest in New Zealand and you wonder if they were trying to build it again they could get approval being in such a beautiful location and next to the iconic Paritutu volcanic plug. You also wonder how they could operate a chemical factory right next to a residential suburb. Many residents and former workers have become very sick and died from exposure to dioxin from 245T manufacture. You can see some of their stories in Let us Spray – a documentary from last year.
In the next week we are going to be visiting the Hawkes Bay, Taupo, Tauranga, Whakatane and Gisborne before the big cities - Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. Visit the Greens website to see the itinerary.
May 21st, 2007 at 3:40 pm
“The station’s 198 meter chimney is one of the tallest in New Zealand and you wonder if they were trying to build it again they could get approval being in such a beautiful location and next to the iconic Paritutu volcanic plug.”
It’s fair enough to attack the power station and the factory for the pollution and so on that they produce, but I’d be less keen to attack the chimney on visual grounds. I was in New Plymouth recently, and the chimney seemed to be almost as “iconic” as Paritutu rock itself, judging by the number of times it appeared in the logos of local businesses.
A similar issue comes up with wind farms: despite their obvious advantages for the production of sustainable energy, they sometimes get attacked for “destroying landscape values”. But what constitutes a beautiful landscape varies from person to person (I much prefer the view down Lambton Quay or Cuba St to that of any mountain or stream), and in the end “landscape values” have no impact on the health of the planet. So let’s concentrate on issues of sustainability, pollution and Greenhouse Gases, rather than debatable aesthetics and a sometimes sentimental view of what constitutes “untouched” nature. Besides, our industrial and infrastructural heritage can often be beautiful on its own terms.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Tomsk, a big vein that the “green” brand (and not just in New Zealand) soley derives from is surface sentimental naturalism and it is not a superior quality that sets it’s adherents apart from the rest that many like to think of themselves as embodying; it is a fairly low common denominator charateristic that we share with the animals and the sublimation is the same as that of an animal’s bias for it’s natural environment in preference of a cage. This level of emphasis on existence was very much to the fore with the Nazis for example.
In very many ways i think, this is why being “green” has such wide spread exposure, for it makes it a very effective pressure valve in western societies while those interests who produce little of the wealth are able to go about owning more and more of it in the dark with the spotlight focussed elsewhere for people to gravitate around, out of the way.
Having said that, i don’t think the NZ Greens are a complete pressure valve in the way described above and are indeed damm irksome to the direction of the controling forces at times; for while my own skepticism of the organization is well developed, press releases like Jeanette’s latest one for example, show a keen realisation beyond sentimental naturalism towards the one and only power that has ever given sufficient strength to movements and people towards environmental harmony and co-existence, that coming from a strong common wealth “shared” in by all.
http://www.democrats.org.nz
Rejigged websight, not fully up and running but speeding up, no comments will be deleted at forums unless slanderous abuse gets out of hand, might be below people to bother with at the moment but as things pick up all will remain welcome.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Surely a chemical plant *should* be safe for nearby residents. After all it ought to be safe for the workers who are there 8+ hours a day.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:18 am
richard_p_auckland Said: “Surely a chemical plant *should* be safe for nearby residents. After all it ought to be safe for the workers who are there 8+ hours a day.”
As far as we knew, it was. As far as we know, it is. Tomorrow we will know if knew enough today.
May 22nd, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Some of us knew the IWD chemical plant was unsafe for both workers and nearby residents many years ago, but no-one was prepared to listen.
Between 1963 and 1967 Opunake GP Dr Phil Cassin had three cases of major congenital deformities and cancers that normally occur, respectively, only once in every million births, once in 100,000 and once in 30,000 births.
Westown Maternity Hospital Charge Nurse Hyacinth Henderson recorded 167 birth defects out of 5392 babies between 1965 and 1971. She reported this to the then Health Department but, although they accepted the area had the highest abnormality rate in New Zealand, they decided it was because she was more conscientious in reporting than other health professionals.
A 1986 Commission of Inquiry gave a clean bill of health to the Paritutu plant, despite extensive evidence of adverse health effects from Vietnam where 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, both manufactured by IWD, had been combined into the defoliant Agent Orange. This had prompted IWD’s parent company, Dow Chemicals, to cease manufacture of 2,4,5-T in the United States in 1983, but IWD persisted until 1987.
A very sad tale of the people who did know not being listened to.
An interesting sideline to this sad tale is that a Vietnam Vet I know, who later became a merchant seaman, swears that Agent Orange itself was manufactured at Paritutu and shipped to Subic Bay in the Philippines for use by the US forces in Vietnam. He says he was working on a vessel when there was a major panic after a barrel of the stuff went overboard at Opua wharf.
But I guess we’ll never know - all the dispatch documentation from the plant at that time has been destroyed, funnily enough! We wouldn’t want IWD and the Government of the day being found to have been complicit in a war crime, would we?
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Hi,
This is interesting. I have a few questions which someone might be able to help with:
1) Is there a publication on the health effects associated with the IWD plant? (A web link would be nice)
2) What were the congenital defects that were reported between 1965 and 1971?
3) Is there only a single maternity hospital in New Plymouth?
I’m just curious.
Thanks
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:33 pm
timo said: This is interesting. I have a few questions which someone might be able to help with: …
1) Yep try these: ESR; Ministry of Health.
2) & 3) - Sorry, don’t know.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Thanks for the links, they were interesting.
Unfortunately, many people with illnesses which may have been caused by exposure to dioxins will never know if the cause really was dioxin exposure, or simply bad luck. The statistics will often be inconclusive, and diagnostic tests will not necessarily be able to determine a link. This is not a defence of the chemical industry, just an unfortunate reality.
I guess it highlights the importance of taking a precautionary approach with the use of chemicals and other technology in food production. What may seem like a great blessing at first, might come back and bite us many years down the track.
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:17 pm
timo said: The statistics will often be inconclusive, and diagnostic tests will not necessarily be able to determine a link.
Exactly - the test for ACC cover is that a claimant who was exposed in their employment has to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that the the risk of suffering the personal injury is significantly greater for persons who perform the employment task than for persons who do not perform it; or is significantly greater for persons who are employed in that type of environment than for persons who are not. Difficult, to say the least.
Somebody who just lived nearby has an even greater hurdle -they have to prove that their injury was caused by accident - this is defined as the absorption of any chemical through the skin within a defined period of time not exceeding 1 month, or in the case of inhalation, the inhalation of any solid, liquid, gas, or foreign object on a specific occasion. Which means, if you have been exposed over aconsiderable period of time, you cannot prove that the causation of your injury occurred within rather than outside, the limitations on exposure defined in the Act.
Otherwise, you can sue Dow Chemicals, and with their resources for legal defence, no-one has a snowball’s hope in hell of success.
The Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act needs to be amende in this regard - there are Scheduled work-related diseases that reverse the onus, so that if you have one of those illnesses and have had the exposure that is known to be causative of the illness, ACC then has the onus of proving that there was some other cause.
The illnesses caused by Dioxin exposure should be added to the list in the Schedule, and extended to those who happenned to be unfortunate enough to just live nearby, rather than actually work with the chemicals.
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:01 am
Toad,
It isn’t only big business that ignores public safety because it is “too expensive”.
In 1947 when Bob Semple introduced the motorways bill into parliament he went slightly off the subject and made an impassioned plea for the removal of power poles from highways, even though the bill only proposed their exclusion from motorway corridors.
In 1954 the Roading Investigation Committee went outside it’s terms of reference and stated that power and telegraph poles were a serious menace to life and limb and recommended urgent action to stop the proliferation of roadside poles.
Governments ignored these calls for action simply because it was cheaper and easier to put the poles in the road rather than crossing private land.
Legislation passed as part of privatising or deregulating utility services has given the upper hand to utility companies, and one particular telco (which must remain nameless) automatically passes all requests for telephone pole removals directly to its lawyers.
In 2001 the LTSA conducted a study of roadside hazards
http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/roads/rss/rss-15.pdf
and found that “the lack of ability to deal with utility poles on the roadside”
was one of three main areas of concern.
Yet the reports released as part of the current government review of utility access to legal roadways actually recommend giving these mainly private utility companies the upper hand and has even suggested removing the prohibition of power poles on motorways.
Perhaps the governments focus groups have revealed that most people believe that only bad drivers have bad crashes and therefore spending money on safer roads is only rewarding bad drivers. It is notable that during Labours 1st term they introduced the Highway Patrol whilst slashing spending on highway safety engineering (allowing for the funding pre-committed to major projects in June 1999), despite the LTSA calling for increased funding in Road Safety Strategy 2010 working paper 7.
http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/publications/docs/sdwp7.pdf
Seems to me Labour is all about selling the image rather than solving the problem.
Mind you, the previous government wasn’t much better. It’s “safety at reasonable cost” slogan sounds like it came straight from a Ford Pinto sales brochure.
May 28th, 2007 at 9:03 am
You have to laugh at those Jafas using the RMA to prosecute themselves for improving the enviroment.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10428897