by Peter Ralph
Chapter 20
Beautiful one day perfect the next was a slogan used by travel agents to describe Queensland’s weather and as Steve rolled back into Marra just after 8am, he thought it was so appropriate. There wasn’t a breath of wind or the sign of a cloud, the sun was already warm and the sky was a perfect, clear blue; a real contrast to the smog he had left behind at Newtower Airport the previous morning. Dennis was waiting for him, looking like one of those tall, lean movie stars from old western movies. Steve knew he was a radical Green who had fought to save the forests, and that he’d spent many nights in the cells over his beliefs. He had delivered hell-raising speeches opposing what the coal seam gas companies were doing to Australia’s health, its food security and its water. As they drove towards the small town of Pinilla, Steve stole a glance at Dennis squished up in the passenger seat; he looked so peaceful and calm, that you might mistakenly think he was harmless.
‘I know of no family that has been as badly mistreated as the Lairds,’ Dennis said, trying to stretch his body. ‘Some of their neighbours signed access agreements and next thing you know the gas companies, with the authority of the Land Court, were on their property. Now there are gas wells all over it and they have some major problems. You’ll like Annie and Peter; they’re the salt of the earth.’
‘What type of problems?’
‘It’s better that you hear about them first-hand. You’re going to be amazed.’
‘That’s all the briefing I get?’
‘You’ll understand why, after you’ve heard them tell you their story.’
As they approached Pinilla, Steve said, ‘Do you feel like stopping for a coffee?’
‘Nah, we’d have to wait ages, it’d taste terrible and be cold by the time we got it. This town employs the dregs, the unemployable. Anyone who’s any good is earning a fortune working for the gas and coal companies. The mining boom has created a society of haves and have nots and God only knows what will happen to these towns when it ends. There are three service stations here and they all close at 6pm because the owners can’t get anyone to work at night, and to think there are fools who call this progress.’
Steve didn’t respond, thinking of all the times he had said you can’t stand in the way of progress. A few minutes after leaving town, they were on a bumpy, red, dirt track.
‘Just stay on this track for another eighty kilometres and when you see the first gas wells we’ll be getting close. I’m going to have a snooze. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wake me.’
It was rich land but the scenery never changed - kilometre after kilometre of grassy fields, gum trees and bushy shrubs. Steve was starting to feel bored when he saw the first gas well about a hundred metres off the track. A little further on, there was a large blue sign with the words Nordic Gas, Safely Developing and Promoting your Community, but the key words had been painted over with Swiftly Raping and Pillaging your Community. He wondered if there had ever been a more hated industry in Australia?
‘Slow down, the entrance to the Laird’s place is coming up on the left,’ Dennis said, yawning.
A few minutes later, Dennis got out of the SUV and opened a large gate to a gravel driveway, and Steve drove across the cattle grid. There were gas wells connected by tracks as far as the eye could see, on pads that were surrounded by mesh fences bearing white placards with large red-lettered Keep Out warning signs. Dennis opened three more gates before they arrived at a white, weatherboard farmhouse which was badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. A wiry, auburn-haired, middle-aged woman with a freckled face, came down the steps from the verandah, her fair skin protected by a wide-brimmed, dark brown Akubra. ‘G’day Dennis,’ she said.
‘Hello, Annie. This is Steve Forrest, the reporter from Paisley that I told you about.’
She extended her hand and Steve was struck by the intensity of her piercing, black eyes. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.
‘I’ve read some of your articles on the Net and you seem to be a bit of a fence-sitter. We ain’t got much time up here for those who play both sides.’
‘Annie, Annie,’ Dennis said. ‘He’s coming around and, after he hears what you’ve gotta say, he’ll be a fully-fledged convert. Don’t worry, Steve, her bark’s worse than her bite. She once told me that, if I ever set foot on her property, she’d blow my head off with a double-barrelled shotgun.’
‘And I would’ve,’ she said, grinning for the first time. ‘Come inside and we’ll have a cuppa. Pete’s down in the paddocks but he knows you’re here and will be up as soon as he can.’
The house was cool, with high ceilings, large draped windows and deep brown, polished floor boards and, as she showed them to the carved timber dining table, Steve was struck by how spotless everything was. A strange combination, he thought; run-down on the exterior and immaculate inside. It wasn’t long before tea and biscuits were on the table.
‘Before I take you around the property, I want you to read this.’ Annie handed Steve a letter on Nordic Gas letterhead.
It was a concise demand, accusing the Lairds of not exercising due care in protecting Nordic’s property, namely the fence surrounding well-head number 54A, which had been knocked over. Nordic sought the sum of $1,700 in recompense, with a threat of legal action if payment wasn’t received within fourteen days.
‘They come onto our land without our permission, they poison our cattle, ruin our breeding, contaminate and deplete our water and, when a few of our bulls accidentally knock one of their fences over, they can’t demand their money fast enough. We have to protect their equipment that we never wanted on our land in the first place. I hate them.’
‘And so do I,’ a stocky little man, with a creased, leathery face, said. ‘We’re the fifth generation of Lairds to own this property and if the other four could see the hell we’re going through they’d be turning in their graves. G’day, Dennis. Jeez you look like you could use a good feed.’
‘G’day, Pete. This is Steve Forrest.’
Peter Laird had taken his boots off, which was why they had not heard him come in. He wasn’t much taller than his wife and had a head full of black, curly hair, and dark, almost black skin. Steve braced his hand for the handshake that he knew was coming and wondered if it was some rite of passage peculiar to farmers and graziers.
‘I’m not gonna bullshit you, Steve, and all I ask is that you write the truth about what I show you. Let’s get going, there’s a lot to see and we’ll start with Old Faithful.’
Steve gulped his tea down and wondered what a geyser in Yellowstone had to do with gas wells.
A few minutes later they were flying along in Pete’s dark green Land Cruiser.
‘We’ve got nearly fifty thousand acres and have a look at the bloody things, they’re everywhere.’ He nodded at the gas wells on his right. ‘They dug trenches all over the place so they could lay their pipelines and, after backfilling, they topped up with gravel so their trucks can get in to do maintenance; not that they ever do any after the wells start to flow. Old Faithful’s coming up on the left.’
They got out of the Toyota and walked over to the first of two fenced enclosures surrounding a well-pad, which was set back forty metres from the inner enclosure. There were warning signs all over both fences. ‘This is a rogue well,’ Pete said. ‘They drilled it four years ago but have been unable to control it, and they’ve been trying to plug it ever since. They’ve just wasted another three weeks pouring cement. Come over here, Steve, and get your camera ready. Just watch the ground between the outer fence and the pad.’
As they drew closer, the ground seemed to take on a life of its own, lifting and subsiding over and over. Steve watched, gobsmacked.
‘It’s the gas under the ground trying to escape, but it’s got nowhere to go and it’s spreading. If they can’t plug it, they’re going to have to build a third fence even further back and then, who knows, maybe a fourth. Yellowstone’s Old Faithful blows every sixty-five minutes, but our Old Faithful never stops bl
owing. I dunno where it’s going to end.’
‘That’s four acres of land they’ve enclosed and you know how much compensation we got? Not a red cent,’ Annie said.
‘Did you complain?’
‘Steve, you don’t understand, Nordic don’t listen to us,’ Pete said. ‘They treat us as if they own the land and we’re their tenants. You know what they called this? “A minor seep.” They said they’d get back to plug it when they have time. Fact is, they can’t plug it. You know, the gas companies have a commitment to restore the land and return it to the owners when the wells stop producing in twenty-five years or so. There’ll be 100,000 wells by then and this won’t be the only rogue. I’m guessing they’ll conveniently forget their commitments, and the government, whatever side’s in power then, will be too gutless to force them. Come on, let’s go. I’ll be sick if I stay here any longer and I want to show you how they’re depleting our water.’
As they climbed back into the Land Cruiser, Pete said. ‘Annie, did you tell Steve what CD you put on every time we get a visit from Nordic?’ Before she could answer he went on, ‘It’s Lies and her favourite lyric is Lies, lies, I can’t believe a word you say. It really pisses them off.’ Pete’s ironic humour wasn’t shared by his wife.
Dennis had talked about falling water levels and pressure, but Steve hadn’t understood and had been unwilling to show his ignorance by questioning him. A few minutes later they stopped at a small enclosure with a dome-like lid in the middle.
‘This one’s ours,’ Pete said, unscrewing the lid. ‘This is where I check our water levels and we should have twenty metres, but you’ll see when I dip it that there’s only seven metres left to pump. Our cattle are dependent on this water and it’s been subsiding ever since Nordic came onto our property.’
‘But how?’
‘I’ve been pondering that. Maybe they use it for fracking, rather than bringing in hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in tankers like they should, or perhaps it’s depleted after they’ve fracked and the water’s exploded to the surface.’
‘Did you confront Nordic?’
‘It’s like dealing with Colonel Klink. “I see nothing! I know nothing!” They’re in total denial,’ Annie said.
‘Us farmers and graziers have water quotas but there are no restrictions on how much the mining and gas companies can use. It’s a bloody joke,’ Pete said, walking over to a large, fenced bore. ‘I had to enclose this because it’s full of methane and I can set the water on fire.’
Steve had seen the same thing in Colorado in the documentary Gasland, but had not understood how it occurred. As if reading his mind, Pete added, ‘The water pressure holds the methane in the aquifers but, when the water levels are depleted, the coal seams are exposed and the escaping methane that fills the void between the level of the water and the surface has to find a way to escape. My family’s been drawing water from this bore for over a hundred years and this has never happened before.’
‘What’d Nordic say about it?’
‘Their scientists said it was genetic.’
‘Genetic?’
‘Naturally occurring,’ Dennis chipped in. ‘The fact that it’s never happened before, and that it only occurred after they’d started drilling, meant nothing. They emphatically denied that they were to blame.’
‘Unbelievable.’
‘I’d love to be able to say you’ve seen it all, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.’
‘They’ve destroyed our lives,’ Annie snapped, as Pete nudged the four-wheel-drive through a herd of Black Angus that were wandering on the track.
‘Steve, we’re heading to a neighbour’s property about twenty kilometres away and, if you aren’t a convert after what you see, you’ll never be,’ Pete said grimly.
After opening and closing five more large gates, they stopped in front of another well-pad. Steve scanned it carefully, looking for movements in the ground, but he didn’t see any. Pete glanced over at Annie. ‘Why don’t you tell Steve what happened, Darling?’
Annie clenched her hands and muttered, ‘Bastards. We hadn’t been well. Pete had been having trouble breathing, the kids had picked up rashes that caused them to scratch all the time and Tony, our youngest boy, bled from the ears. Then we found out that Nordic fracked this well about six months ago and that it went badly wrong, but they never said a word. We only found out about it because one of their workers got drunk in the Hallby pub one night and mouthed off. It turned out that they’d poisoned an aquifer, which joins up with the one under our property. The gas companies have always said that it’s impossible for this to occur and Nordic, once they knew about it, had a legal and moral responsibility to report it but, instead, they tried to cover it up. So much for self-regulation. They didn’t tell old Sam Arnold, who owns the property; they didn’t tell us, despite knowing that we were drawing water from an adjoining aquifer, and they didn’t tell any of the others who were taking water from these two aquifers. After they found out that we knew what they’d been up to, they owned up, saying it was an unfortunate accident that they’d overlooked reporting. Liars!’
‘And surprise, surprise. The environment authorities and government took no action; not even a public admonishment,’ Pete said. ‘Instead, they got stuck into us.’
‘Yeah, we found out that they’d pumped one hundred and fifty litres of THPS down the well and, while we didn’t know what it was then or if it was dangerous, we soon found out,’ Annie continued. ‘It’s toxic. It can result in death, severe eye inflammation, skin allergies, irritation of the mouth and gastro-intestinal tract and can cause chemical pneumonia. If we’d been drinking bore water, they might’ve killed us. I’m so bloody angry. Luckily we draw our drinking water from rainwater tanks, but that didn’t help our cattle: they not only lost condition, but clumps fell off their coats and they looked like walking patchwork quilts. What were the idiots thinking when they pumped this poison into our water? Half the fracking chemicals remain below the surface, in the coal seams, and we know they can move through the ground water. It terrifies me when I hear numbers like 100,000 wells in Queensland.’
‘And you know what the authorities and our esteemed government did?’ Pete said. ‘They banned us and our neighbours from selling our cattle or having them slaughtered until tests had cleared them of contamination. Then they issued a belated warning telling us not to let our animals drink the bore water, even though they’d already been drinking it for six months. They should’ve thrown the book at Nordic, but they were scared they’d pull their money out of the development and go back to London. Money really talks up here and there’s no shortage of willing ears in this pathetic government. Some of the smaller companies are occasionally rapped on the knuckles as a government face-saving exercise, but the big ones, like Nordic, are untouchable.’
‘Incredible isn’t it?’ Annie said, taking up the story again. ‘The same government that says the extraction of coal seam gas is safe, and that there’s no risk to the Great Artesian Basin and the aquifers, couldn’t get to us fast enough to stop us selling our cattle. Anyhow, we weren’t convinced that THPS was the only poisonous chemical used. So we applied to the government to look at the company’s data sheets and, after they’d tried to wear us down by procrastination, they eventually released them. It was then that I noticed that the data sheet on THPS was American, ten years out of date and missing critical information. We took the rest of the data sheets to an Australian specialist in chemical management and she said they didn’t meet Australian standards and were in breach of the Dangerous Goods Safety Management Act and the national code for material safety data sheets.’
‘The data sheets form part of the environmental applications don’t they?’
‘Yeah,’ Pete laughed. ‘The gas companies have got ’em down pat and they run to thousands and thousands of pages and they know that neither the authorities nor the government have the personnel or the expertise to examine them. Tell me one other reason why Nordic could get
away with copying a foreign company’s incomplete data sheet, typing their name on the top and then submitting it as if it was their own, and it’s not detected? Spare me.’
‘What action did the government take against Nordic?’
‘You’re joking,’ Annie said. ‘Nothing, of course.’
‘Let’s go back to the house for drinks and I’ll show you a file that you might find interesting. By the way, Steve, did you notice anything strange about the herds of cattle here and on our property?’
He was no farmer but racked his brain for an answer. The cattle on this property were brown and white, while the cattle on the Lairds’ property were black, but surely that wasn’t the answer. ‘Sorry, Pete, I didn’t.’
‘There are no calves in the herds. Our breeding started to fall away four years ago, then we went through a spate of stillborn calves and the occasional few with deformities. In the past twelve months, we haven’t had one newborn.’
They were all silent for a few minutes until Pete, entering his property through another entrance, said, ‘If you look out to the right, you’ll see the well-pad fence that our bulls flattened. I won’t stop, but I want to show you the next two wells.’ Slowing down, he drove off the track again, stopping fifty metres away from another well-pad. ‘I don’t want to get too close to this one and you’ll soon see why.’
Steve could hear the hissing as they strode through the grass towards the well-head, ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a methane leak, a big one, and it’s escaping straight into the atmosphere. This is the worst one, but half the well-heads on our property are leaking and no-one gives a damn. This stuff is highly volatile, so we fenced off twenty acres to stop the cattle getting down here. If those bulls had accidentally knocked down this fence, we might’ve had a major disaster on our hands. The fence posts and the equipment are made of steel and all it would take is one small spark.’