In the original model submitted for the Sydney Olympics, competitors were to travel by ferry from the Sydney Opera House to the Games site at Homebush Bay, 16 kilometres away. This pleasing image of the world's top athletes cruising the sparkling waterways of Sydney Harbour was shattered by, among others, Dr John Pollak, a biochemist and toxicologist. Eighty-four-year-old Pollak, a veteran environmental activist and co-founder in 1975 of a movement called Social Responsibility in Science (SRS), referred the Games organisers to a US Environment Protection Agency report from 1994. It listed Homebush Bay as one of the five worst dioxin hot-spots in the world.
The dioxin in Homebush Bay is the legacy of pesticides produced on the harbour foreshore from shortly after the second World War. In 1957, the US multinational Union Carbide took over the factory and continued to manufacture 2,4-D and 2,4,5T, ingredients of the herbicide Agent Orange, with dioxin as a by-product. In 1970, after the toxicity of dioxin became known, the dioxin was stored in drums and disposed of under supervision. But for more than two decades before that, dioxin and other toxic waste was tipped around the foreshore and into the bay. The authorities of the day approved the process, which was seen as reclaiming the stinking wetlands for a useful industrial purpose.
The locals around Homebush were amazed when they heard the Olympics were coming to what they called Dead Bay. "We just laughed," recalls Steve Bell, who grew up in the area. "We couldn't wait to see the T-shirt: `Come to Sydney for the Green Games at Dead Bay'." As a child, Bell used to catch fish in the bay. Their appearance was alarming. "They used to have big red spots on them, big as your thumbnail, and sometimes the scales would have a greenish tinge. We'd just chuck 'em back. Even then we knew not to eat them."
In 1989, fishing was banned in Homebush Bay. The ban is still in place but, as Dr Pollak acidly remarks, "Has anyone told the fish?" Dioxin is not soluble in water, but binds to the sediment in the bay, where it can be ingested by bottom-feeding fish and make its way into the food chain. Hence, too, the inadvisability of churning up the sediments with ferry wash from the Games transport. That proposal was quietly dropped; the athletes will be conveyed to the stadium by bus and train.
But the Olympics has brought good news for environmentalists in Sydney: the Games have brought with them one of the world's most massive remediation efforts. Ten years after the attempt to site the Games on a toxic dump was mooted, the mangroves are spreading, the wetlands are thriving and, in a world first, the dreaded dioxin in the bay is soon to be tackled.
"People get stuck, stuck, stuck on toxicity - `most toxic substance known to man, guinea pigs die at parts per quadrillion etcetera.' " Dr Kate Hughes, director of Ecology Programs at the Olympics Co-ordination Authority in Sydney, is getting passionate about dioxin. She pauses, exasperated. "It's not just the toxicity, it's where it's going: its transport in the environment and its ultimate fate."
Coming from anyone else, a plea not to focus on the well-recognised toxicity of dioxin might be dismissed as spin-doctoring. After all, the Olympics are big business and Sydney's promise to deliver a Green Games - despite having nominated a contaminated industrial wasteland as its site - was a major factor in winning the bid.
Hughes co-wrote the environmental guidelines for that bid. For two decades, she has been Australia's most vocal anti-toxics crusader, scourge of the cotton and chemical industries and trenchant community advocate. She is as surprised as anyone else to be running an 11 million Australian dollar "Enhanced Remediation" strategy from the corporate comfort of the OCA. "You can be an activist in many ways," she points out. "You can work on the outside or the inside. I thought, with the Olympics as driver, we can actually sort this now."
It would take a lot more than someone of even Dr Hughes's formidable energy to "sort" the lethal legacy of the 760-hectare site. One hundred years of industrial history and associated indiscriminate dumping has left a cocktail not only of dioxin, but of asbestos, pesticides, paint products, petrochemicals, heavy metals, tars and organochlorines, along with building rubble, putrescible garbage and domestic waste - some nine million cubic metres in all, most of it thrown willy-nilly into the wetlands and mangroves around Homebush Bay. But while there is still much unfinished business, a decade on and some $137 million later, the depredations of public ignorance, political neglect and corporate inaccountability are at last being reversed.
WHEN Steve Bell was growing up in Homebush Bay in the 1960s, the industrial landscape was a kid's paradise. School sometimes closed early when emissions from the Shell Oil refinery were particularly bad. "The fellow down the street was a drover. He used to have keys for the traffic lights and we'd drive two or three thousand sheep across the main road into the abbatoirs."
From her home across the Parramatta River, Dorothy Packer would watch the speedboat races near Silverwater Bridge. "Many days they had to close them because of the black smoke. It used to come over in great waves the children's legs would be covered with black, our footpaths were black, our Venetian blinds were pitted. And this stream of foul air - the odour was shocking. We'd have to close our windows at night, even in summer."
The black air assailing the Packer family came from the Petroleum and Chemical Corporation Australia Ltd factory, which opened at Silverwater in 1954. An American company, it "cracked" crude oil to produce gas for the town. The four to five tons of tarry sludge produced each day as a by-product was dumped in ponds on site.
By 1957, Dorothy Packer had had enough. "People had headaches, asthma, hay fever, coughs and many other things. They used to growl about the smoke, but Australians are laid back, they thought it wasn't their right to challenge people. I don't worry about what people think. I was brought up with high principles and honesty and I think companies should adhere to that." For 17 years, Dorothy Packer sent a barrage of letters to politicians, public servants and PACCAL itself, protesting about the pollution. They were largely ignored. "We'll do all we can. Blah blah blah. You knew you were fighting it on your own."
Today the Australian Environment Protection Authority can impose fines of up to a million dollars on corporate polluters, but in the 1950s and 1960s, the absence of punitive legislation reflected a society that equated industry with progress and factories with work. The merit of the industry around Homebush was clear: bricks from the State Brickworks to build homes for returned servicemen; paints from ICI and Berger to beautify them; town gas to heat them; creosote to preserve timber; and, in the late 1940s, exciting new weed-killers, which seemed like the salvation of Australian agriculture.
"The whole chemical industry was considered a good thing then," recalls Colin Bowes, the production manager at Australian Petrochemicals Ltd, which made styrene, a revolutionary new plastic used for everything from clothes-pegs to synthetic rubber tyres. Bowes, at university in the 1940s, was proud of his job. "When the Japanese overran Malaya and Indonesia, rubber supplies were cut off. If troubled times occurred again, Australia could make it locally."
Timbrol was founded from similarly patriotic motives in 1925. Having seen the effects of mustard gas in the first World War, engineer John Peake determined to make Australia more chemically self-reliant. By 1957, when it was taken over by Union Carbide, Timbrol was an innovative Australian producer of specialist chemicals, including DDT and herbicides.
"It was a stimulating situation," recalls John Court, who joined Union Carbide Australia in 1960 as a young chemical engineer. "Highly committed employees and very clever chemists." The ill-effects of products such as DDT were yet to be documented in Rachel Carson's landmark book, Silent Spring, and as an impurity of the weed-killers 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, dioxin was blithely sprayed up and down Australia.
Living virtually on site for three years, and with a young baby, John Court took a lively interest in health matters. "We knew all those chemicals had to be treated with care and there were regular blood-count and medical checks on the employees. [But] even if we had known dioxin was a problem, we didn't have instrumentation to measure it in those days." In a crude but effective bioassay, the factory was ringed with tomato plants - if the leaves curled, the herbicide must be leaking.
By 1970, when the toxicity of dioxin became known, Court had joined the Department of Public Health. " `Poacher to gamekeeper' is an analogy we often used. We understood the industry and could also see where the skeletons, if you like, might be hung." That year saw the formation of the State Pollution Control Commission and the Metropolitan Waste Management Authority, and the passing of the Clean Waters Act. But no-one yet realised the extent of the contamination.
Two years of investigations revealed that about 20 per cent of the site was contaminated. The aim was not to clean it up, but to make it safe and functional. "The first move is to contain the contaminants," explains John Pym, the engineer who directed most of the remediation. "Then you try and induce a process that gradually restores the natural balance."
The problems are many. To treat a toxin, you must first identify it. But chemical analysis only allows you to find what you have tested for. Mixtures pose another problem. "If you had 25 chemicals, which is quite common in waste disposal sites, you could have well over a million different combinations and permutations," says Dr Pollak. "Their interaction can be synergistic or antagonistic. Synergistic means two and two doesn't make four, it makes 16 or whatever, and antagonistic means two chemicals together can actually be less toxic than by themselves."
Steve Bell is blunter. "They've got things that have amalgamated and they don't know what these new things are - it's like a mad scientist's lab."
"There is no known process for treating mixed waste," says Pym. "And if we're talking high principles, you have to recognise that you cannot create nor destroy matter. So you don't remove materials, you only change their character."
THE early approach was ultra-cautious. Some 100,000 cubic metres of gasworks and asbestos waste was enclosed in two vaults, which were lined and entombed beneath the carpark of the new Aquatic Centre. But by 1992, this "dry landfill" model was superseded. The formula was still to "cap and contain" the waste, but with two new keywords: consolidate and bioremediate.
In consolidation, the polluted soil on the site was gathered into four huge mounds 25 metres high: the relieved natural habitats could then recover. The mounds were sealed beneath a metre of clay and the top landscaped. The waste they contained will slowly decompose, emitting methane gas and a contaminated liquid which can contain toxic levels of ammonia.
In bioremediation, the mounds' steep slopes allow wind action to pump air into the soil, which helps break methane down into water and carbon dioxide, which in turn promotes plant-growth on the surface. Some of what escapes is passed to an evaporation pond, where specially-planted grasses extract the ammonia as a nutrient.
The rest is processed at Lidcombe Waste Treatment plant, next to the Olympic village. Media articles acclaiming the architecture of the new development fail to mention the air quality - the plant emits a range of pollutants to the atmosphere under EPA monitoring.
Bob Symington, of Green Games Watch, is not impressed by the use of LWT, which he says is not ecologically sustainable. "It gives out emissions, discharges to the sewerage system and produces a solid filter cake which goes to landfill." Hughes responds that it's only a short-term solution until a programme being run by Sydney University can establish the nature of the leachate toxicity.
On 20 November 1974, Dorothy Packer fired off her last, jubilant letter: "How happy I am to learn that your filthy, destroying factory is closing down . . . " A combination of rocketing oil prices and the arrival of natural gas, not to mention 50 breaches of the Clean Air Act, had finally sent PACCAL packing. But the story was far from over.
The abandoned site was eventually converted, as was common practice, to parkland and sports fields. Groundsman Brian Simpson started work at the new Wilson Park in 1990. He soon noticed something was amiss. "We were digging and our hands became sort of blistered and stinging and we were having problems with the pipes of the sprinkler system. There'd be holes actually eaten into them. In summer, tar would bubble up out of the ground."
Simpson began to intensively manage the new cricket pitch. Coming from a farm in Co Antrim, he was well attuned to land care. "I thought, well, ground has a great habit of healing itself, so I started to put a lot of fertiliser into it, water it and water it - and unbeknownst to me, I was creating microbes and the microbes were starting to eat up the pollution."
Underneath the clipped green grass lay PACCAL's enduring legacy - about a 250,000 tons of tarry sludge, enough to fill two Olympic swimming pools. In June 1992, Wilson Park was closed to the public. "The material was found to be polyaromatic hydrocarbons, benzenes, tars, oils," says David Sheumack, the chemist called in to assess the situation.
Benzene, being volatile and a known carcinogen, was a major concern. But Sheumack discovered that the abundant supply of tarry waste had caused benzeneeating bacteria to proliferate. All they needed to thrive were the additional factors of air, water, nutrient and a fertile topsoil, which the conscientious groundsmen had been supplying. A dam was built to prevent further leakage to the river, conditions were varied to maximise microbial growth, and, by 1999, three-quarters of the park was independently assessed as being fit for public use. The final quarter was so polluted Sheumack estimates it will not be released until 2005.
Around a bend in the Parramatta River, just over 2 kilometres from the Olympic Stadium, the dioxin legacy is more intractable. From the late 1940s, with the approval of the Maritime Services Board, Timbrol/Union Carbide reclaimed the foreshore by spreading spent lime, boiler ash, dredgings and other `fill' across 13 acres.
Union Carbide began to decommission its Homebush plant in 1984, the year its plant in Bhopal, India, leaked a deadly gas that killed nearly 4,000 people and injured a further 200,000. "Nobody was very clear where the dioxin had gone," recalls John Court, by then chief of the water division of the SPCC, which set guidelines for the site to be remediated. As no technology was then available to break down the dioxin, the approach was simple enough: scrape off the top layer of contaminated soil and encapsulate it and the plant components beneath a metre of impermeable clay.
Union Carbide spent some $5 million on the clean-up. Along the way, it changed its name to Zendel, a shelf-company whose only asset was the site itself and which could be sacrificed in the event of litigation. Ted Johnstone, who oversaw the scientific side of the work, recalls that "stringent safety precautions" were taken. But there were hiccups at the start. Around 1988, union organiser Dick Whitehead visited the site and found "blokes in shorts and flip-flops" sitting in the tracks made by their earth-moving equipment, having lunch. Appalled, Whitehead immediately banned further work.
A meticulous Occupational Health and Safety protocol was established, monitored by union delegate Geordie Goodman. The tough Antrim man came under intense pressure - from workers who did not understand the necessity for the endless showers and cumbersome protective clothing, and from contractors out to cut corners, who offered him inducements to look the other way. "There were a lot of people wishing I was back in Belfast," Goodman says darkly.
The contaminated sediments in the bay remained a problem. "Dioxin is such an emotional word," says Dr Pollak. "There are other chemicals of similar toxicity that are never mentioned." In 1992, Pollak borrowed a boat from Greenpeace, dug up some sludge and had it analysed for PCBs (polychlorinated biphenols). Subsequent tests confirmed the bay has disturbing levels of DDT, dieldrin, chlorinated benzenes, phenols, polyaromatic hydrocarbons and metals. With the staging of the Olympics, the dioxin issue assumed a new urgency. Zendel, by then Lednez (Zendel spelt backwards), maintained that since the MSB had approved the original dumping, it could not be held responsible. In March 1999, the state government finally purchased the troubled site. The official cost was $1 - plus the $20 million it has pledged to remediate the land and bay to a standard permitting residential redevelopment.
Four consortiums have tendered for the clean-up. Work is expected to start late next year and take about four years to complete. With touching faith, the developers of one housing estate on Homebush Bay are already advertising that the waters of the bay "present no adverse health risks to recreational users".
Meanwhile, back on the Olympics site, the soil has since been steam-cleaned to extract contaminants, which will shortly be chemically treated to break the toxins down into their harmless constituent parts.
The first that John Douglas knew about the dioxin waste was when he looked out the window of his Melrose Park house and saw "men in moonsuits" moving earth around only 400 metres away across the Parramatta River. A couple of years earlier, Douglas had become alarmed at the amount of dust blowing into his swimming pool from the huge North Newington remediation mound. "We were getting half an inch of sediment filling our pool on a regular basis," he says. With other concerned residents, Douglas formed a group to liaise with the OCA. The former biomedical scientist is fatalistic about the risks - "I'm trusting the authorities have done the right thing."
His neighbour, Michelle Brass, is far less sanguine. From a still-born first child eight years ago to the collapse of her seemingly fit husband at 42, her family has been plagued with problems. A naturopath who follows a healthy lifestyle, Brass is at a loss to explain her three children's joint-pain and respiratory problems, her own auto-immune disease and the restricted breathing she has felt over the past two years - around the time residents opposite the remediation works started to notice increased dust in their homes. "I'm not pointing the finger at anyone because I don't think that's possible at this stage," she says. "I do know the area over there is extremely toxic and a lot of work has been done without informing residents. Had I been informed, I would not have stayed." After recent tests revealed that Brass and her husband have chromosomal damage, they decided to sell up and move.
Hughes acknowledges the OCA did not hold adequate consultations with Melrose Park residents: "An oversight - and it has caused a lot of grief." She maintains that while dust was inevitable with some 2,000 trucks a day moving dirt around at the peak of activities, any dust did not automatically contain contaminants. Dust was minimised and monitoring results were posted on the OCA website. A shut-down level of one-tenth the Australian Workcover level applied. "The principle was very sensible," Hughes says. "`Protect the workers, and therefore you'll protect the community'." The OHS regime was reviewed by Dr Garry Smith, a toxicologist and risk-assessment consultant retained by the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union. He considers the Olympic site operated "to a much better standard than the average worksite. I'm pretty fussy, and every single recommendation of mine was acted upon."
John Pym believes "the precautionary principle is actually: if you have an adverse set of circumstances, you don't necessarily have to improve it to 100 per cent. If you can improve it even 60 per cent, you should proceed, while you develop the knowledge on how to finish off the remaining bit. We've used all the available knowledge, but we still don't know if the answer's perfect. We know it's a lot better than it was."
For that reason, the environmental movement broadly supports the transformation being wrought at Homebush, whose physical legacy will be the Millennium Parklands, at 450 hectares bigger than New York's Central Park.
Kate Hughes believes the social impact could be even greater. "The real legacy for me of these Green Games is recognising the price of the consumer culture. Unless people understand the implications of their wastestream, we're going to continue to have tips.
"Unless you have that understanding, you won't have the right laws and the private sector responding the way you want. This is a terrific opportunity to go beyond toxics."
Freelance writer and broadcaster Siobhan McHugh has recently compiled an oral history of the Olympics site remediation for the OCA. smchugh@bigpond.com