The president of a new coalition for Australian communities affected by PFAS contamination says Wodonga residents “should be concerned” by the levels of the chemicals that are present in and around the Bandiana Military Area.
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The Border Mail has reported this week results of a detailed site investigation done for the Defence Force, which show PFAS have migrated off-base.
Lindsay Clout said that further testing was being done in Wodonga to determine the level of risk presented to people and the environment was concerning, and was a process done in his home of Williamtown, where a class action is underway.
“We made a lot of noise from the start in 2015, because having just gone through a coal seam gas fight with a company, we knew the processes,” he said.
“In other places, media are breaking the story.
“A contributor to that is two issues – one is people have trust that the Department of Defence will be doing the right thing, and the second is that people have been given information that tends not to be alarmist.”
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Mr Clout said information relayed in Wodonga on Monday, including that PFAS had been found at elevated levels in some creeks but it was not in drinking water and was understood to present a low risk to human health, “he’d heard all before”.
“Proximity to the source is a common denominator, but we had a family that was living outside the exclusion zone at a property only 18 months old and the mother was cooking cakes with duck eggs – the child had three times the PFAS blood concentration of her mum,” he said.
“We fought for two years to get acknowledgement from the NSW EPA that this chemical is airborne, and that the air is a transmission pathway.
“Once you take that on board, if you have wind and rain and people collecting tank water, you don’t how far it’s spreading.
“I think everybody should be concerned until the plume of contamination is defined and there is a blood testing program so people know their levels.”
Defence First Assistant Secretary Infrastructure Chris Birrer said it would be not decided whether voluntary blood testing would be offered on the Border until after the Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessment was completed in the first quarter of next year.
Mr Clout encouraged anyone with concerns to reach out, and to keep up to date on the Coalition Against PFAS website.
“People may regard my comments as being alarmist, I say no,” he said.
“It’s an emerging problem, and we don’t have enough information about it.
“I spoke quite strongly at a hearing in Canberra last Friday, to make these people understand we as a community are not going to sit by and be lab-rats.”
