Black Swamp Pollution Update

April 4, 2009

On February 25, 2009, I photographed a serious pollution event in the Black Swamp

wetland on land owned by North Coast Water, east of the Shannon Creek dam. The

Swamp is within a compensatory habitat area and subject to a voluntary conservation

agreement. It contains two Endangered Ecological Communities, core Koala habitat,

and rare inland Swamp Mahogany, supporting a host of other significant species

which once included three endangered flora. Two of those species have not been

recorded in three years and ,as a result of a three year failure to address weeds,

official monitoring has shown the third reduced from thousands, to a handful.

The pollution event, resulting from erosion of the service track for the water supply

pipeline, was predicted in our 2004 submission against the trenching of the pipeline

across the swamp, and has direct resulted from North Coast Water's negligence.

A month to the day after reporting the incident to Clarence Valley Council, I

received a letter from the General Manager assuring me the problem was being fixed,

claiming the pollution was “partially" prevented by sediment control mesh placed

beside the service track after construction of the pipeline. However, he failed to

acknowledge that the same sediment control works actually caused the problem by

damming a gully which diverted the flows onto the track. He also failed to

acknowledge that the sediment control barrier that “partially" prevented the

pollution, formed a dam effectively drowning a population of endangered plants

.

The above photograph shows where the gully broke through a flimsy gravel

containment bank, and ran down the pipeline maintenance track, causing the erosion,

which resulted in tonnes of silt flowing into Black Swamp's endangered community.