A poisoned land

In 2018 the state’s environment watchdog discovered a massive toxic waste dump at Kaniva in outback Victoria. Chris Vedelago reports on the clean-up.

Hidden beneath this remote bushland in Victoria’s far west lay a looming environmental disaster.

In late 2018, the Environment Protection Authority discovered vast amounts of toxic waste appeared to have been secretly buried near the town of Kaniva.

Millions of litres of highly flammable chemicals and acids. More than 50,000 acetylene gas cylinders. Syringes, blood and tissue samples. Pesticides. Asbestos. PFAS. Explosive airbag detonators.

The land and water beneath the nearly three dozen pits and trenches dug into the soft sand have become a toxic soup, stained in a kaleidoscope of colours from the leaking waste.

An ink-black pond. Purple soil. Pools of mysterious red, green and blue liquids. The contamination is so pervasive that even the air carries a hazardous chemical stench. This is the environmental legacy left by an alleged five-year illegal dumping operation that turned a remote bush property near the South Australian border into a vast subterranean stockpile of some of the most dangerous waste produced by modern society.

For more than three years, the EPA has been running what is believed to be the biggest, most complex environmental clean-up operation in the nation’s history at the site given the code name ‘‘Lemon Springs’’. The stakes are high. Underneath this land lies a massive aquifer that supplies water to communities and farms on both sides of the border. So far, the water system remains pristine.

The Age was granted access to the dumpsite and the specialised remediation facility the regulator has built on site, a project costing tens of millions of dollars.

This is the inside view.

No one knows more about the toxic

history of Lemon Springs than EPA project manager Julian Bull, one of the first experts from the environment watchdog to inspect the site and the person who will probably be the last to leave.

Bull is The Age’s guide for a three-hour tour of the massive clean-up operation at the sprawling 566-hectare property.

‘‘It’s probably the biggest waste site the country’s ever had in terms of the hazardous environment that was created and the complexity of the cleanup,’’ he says. ‘‘The scale of what happened here is just staggering.’’

A condition of the tour is that the EPA will not discuss Graham Leslie White, the truck driver-turned-recycling entrepreneur who is due to stand trial over his alleged involvement in what happened at Lemon Springs.

The 61-year-old has pleaded not guilty to 118 charges for allegedly transporting and burying waste, and creating an environmental hazard.

It is a matter of public record that White bought the property, more than 400 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, in mid-2012. The location is isolated – it’s 17 kilometres from the nearest town (population: 683) and surrounded by commercial farms, bushland and the Little Desert National Park. Dozens of tracks and clearings were cut into the heavy bushland in the years after White took ownership.

In late 2018, the EPA began investigating the property after White was accused of involvement in one of the worst industrial blazes in Melbourne in decades. The fire had burnt for more than two weeks, fuelled by hundreds of drums of chemicals and gas cylinders that had allegedly been illegally stockpiled in a warehouse in West Footscray.

(In his coming trial, White is also facing dozens of charges relating to that fire and the alleged stockpiling of chemical waste in a series of warehouses in the city’s northern suburbs, charges that he is also defending.)

‘‘It was unclear exactly what we had here when we first arrived, but we suspected it was going to be serious,’’ Bull says. ‘‘Every hole you dug, it got bigger.’’

Drone-mounted ground-penetrating radar, metal detectors and test excavations eventually identified 32 distinct waste burial sites. There was little rhyme or reason to what was found, and each excavation would provide dangerous surprises.

‘‘First we were dealing with chemical waste, then it was gas cylinders, then it was drums full of asbestos,’’ Bull says.

Also uncovered and intermixed were stockpiles of syringes, acids, pesticides, airbag detonators and other liquids and powders that defied identification without lab tests.

‘‘Each type of waste has to be handled differently in terms of safety risks and treated in different ways in order to dispose of them,’’ Bull says.

The scarred landscape caused by the

clean-up at Lemon Springs suggests just how massive and sophisticated the alleged dumping operation was. The EPA has recovered more than 1.5 million litres of liquid chemical waste from thousands of steel barrels and plastic storage containers buried on the property. It’s enough to fill more than 80 semi-trailers.

At some sites, according to the EPA, trenches were dug to the size of seven semi-trailers set side by side.

The heavy equipment which the EPA alleges was used to dig, dump and conceal the volumes of waste it has found included an excavator, bulldozer, forklift and a huge dump truck – painted in camouflage – that wouldn’t be out of place in the Pilbara.

Investigators claim burial work was done under the cover of night, using powerful lighting gear, batteries and a massive generator found on the property.

An old farmhouse close to the road was left empty in favour of a living compound constructed from a series of shipping containers and a caravan set further back in the bush that had also been coated in camouflage paint.

In its early days, according to the EPA, the alleged dumping operation took care to disturb as little of the bushland as possible by cutting a few driving tracks far into the property, spacing the dumpsites far apart and then capping some of them with sand hills.

In 2014, the alleged activity had been disguised well enough to convince a council inspector that the new trails and mounds were no more than a quadbiking course.

Site 24 is believed to be one of the first created, a massive six-metre-deep pit that was set more than 1.5 kilometres back from the road line of the property. It was filled with drums and plastic containers of highly flammable solvents, acids and other chemicals.

‘‘It was one of the deepest holes we found, where waste had just been crammed into it and crushed down,’’ Bull says. ‘‘But there had been chemical reactions, it had melted and caught on fire. It was madness in there.’’

In the later stages of the dumping operation, discretion and caution were apparently jettisoned in what the EPA claims was a bid to bury as much waste as possible as fast as possible in dumpsites clustered close to the driveway access to Lemon Springs.

Drums of chemicals and gas cylinders were tipped into shallow trenches about 200 metres from the public road and covered with a thin layer of earth. The hasty cover-up and stench of chemicals were obvious signs of what lay beneath.

A broken container of syringes and blood samples found poking through the earth proved to be just the tip of a fourmetre pile of hastily concealed waste. In another location, chemical drums were exposed when a sinkhole opened up.

Investigators were also stunned to discover the living compound had actually been built directly on top of a stockpile of chemical drums and acetylene tanks.

‘‘Once we started digging up this location, we actually had a chemical reaction – it was smoking,’’ says Bull.

The clean-up crew was forced to work from inside excavators in full hazmat gear and respirators. ‘‘Someone had actually been living there, on top of that.’’

The biggest alleged dumpsite at

Lemon Springs was discovered because of a potent, inexplicable smell. EPA clean-up crews driving between known dumpsites on a dirt track cut through a copse kept catching an intense chemical odour in the air.

‘‘We came here so many times and we couldn’t get any hits on anything, but now we know why – the site was so massive we couldn’t really see the scale of it,’’ Bull says.

Sampling and excavation eventually revealed a series of massive, deep trenches had been dug among the trees. Once the waste was buried, the surrounding dense bush had quickly regrown.

The equivalent of 32 semi-trailer truckloads of waste was found here.

Known as Site 23, it demonstrates the scale of what the EPA was up against at Lemon Springs and the extreme measures needed to clean it up.

Each container of liquid waste extracted from the ground must be inspected and tested and then the contents ‘‘decanted’’ into a new vessel so it can be safely transported for disposal at licensed facilities in the city.

‘‘The containers were coming out highly compromised – all banged up, cracked and leaking,’’ Bull says. ‘‘About 93 per cent of the chemical containers we’ve found were classified as ‘compromised’.’’

This pervasive leakage has caused widespread soil contamination. More than 1660 dump-truck loads of toxic soil have been removed from the pits and trenches at Lemon Springs. Much of the toxic soil has been treated on site, but some proved so dangerous it was sent off for incineration or disposal at special landfills.

EPA water monitoring bores drilled around the property show that no contaminants have ever leached into the huge aquifer about 60 metres below the property.

Bull says a thick layer of clay that winds its way underneath the land at depths of two to six metres is a ‘‘saving grace’’ that has kept the seeping chemicals contained inside a kind of subterranean bowl.

The clay layer also appears to have limited just how deep the pits could be dug before waste was tipped in.

This natural feature – augmented by a huge pumping operation, evaporation ponds and a sanitation plant built on-site

– has helped contain the millions of litres of contaminated water created by leaking waste after the record rains in the state’s west this year.

Site 23 also disgorged more than 15,700 acetylene gas cylinders, which had been tipped higgledy-piggledy into the pits despite still potentially containing the highly flammable gas.

Planning documents show White’s company, Valen Pty Ltd, had obtained a permit to recycle these types of tanks at a warehouse facility in Campbellfield using a custom-designed technology.

It is not known how many tanks the business actually recycled, but 44,000 cylinders have so far been found buried on the property. The EPA believes there are still 10,000 in the last site to be cleared.

Each tank must be lifted from the ground using a mechanical claw, tested for leaks, sealed and then fitted into cages for delivery to a storage pad on the property. The pad has tripled in size as more and more tanks have been discovered.

‘‘It’s a mad scale, isn’t it?’’ Bull says.

The EPA recently announced a new facility would be built in the rural town of Stawell where the gas cylinders can be safely recycled, a solution that had to be designed from the ground up because there was nowhere else in Australia they could be taken.

Tens of thousands of tanks being stockpiled by businesses and industry elsewhere around the country can now be recycled as a result.

It’s hard to imagine from the air

that this pockmarked land and the massive infrastructure planted on it for the clean-up will soon be gone.

The EPA expects Lemon Springs will be returned to its ‘‘natural’’ state by the middle of the year.

Bull says the property is basically the same country as the Little Desert National Park that begins on its eastern border.

The EPA has been in discussions about eventually selling the land to a local conservation group.

‘‘The wildlife here is amazing: endangered cockatoos, deer, echidnas, lizards, snakes, black wallabies and emus have all been seen,’’ Bull says.

‘‘There’s actually a lemon tree still growing here even after all this – but I probably wouldn’t eat them.’’