Air quality at centre of town’s debate on dust

Port Hedland has come a long way in reducing dust emissions but further monitoring is still required, the head of the Environmental Protection Authority said last week.

The independent government body toured sites and held a community forum in Hedland on Thursday, inspecting the expansion of the Fortescue Metals Group port, dredging of South West Creek and the North West Infrastructure Multi- User Port.

EPA chairman Paul Vogel said the primary reason for the visit was to look at how cumulative air quality issues were being managed by industry and government.

“We’ve been pushing very hard over the last four years to make sure each project understands what its contribution is to the cumulative issue,” he said.

“We implemented an air quality monitoring network so we were all using the same model around four years ago, and if you look at the number of exceedences of the standard it’s gone down from two dozen a few years ago to a handful now.”

Dr Vogel said as long as close monitoring and management continued, there was no reason further iron ore stockpiling and exports would increase dust levels.

“As long as you understand what it is they’re adding, and use the same model, we can predict what concentration of dust they will emit and how that will add to the ambient dust levels,” he said.

“If they put it into the model and it comes out looking pretty bad it will drive the regulator to say ‘it looks like you’ll not comply here, what are you going to do’.”

Dr Vogel conceded the EPA needed to better understand how future developments would impact on dust exposure issues.

“We need to understand better…where residential development is occurring now and into the future, and what we need to put in place to deliver positive outcomes,” he said.

“You’ve got to be careful that you’re making sensible decisions about what levels you can achieve without being prohibitively costly and still protecting people’s health.

“Looking at it from the air you can see you’ve got industry, you’ve got people and you’ve got a marine environment in close proximity, and you’ve got to say it’s working pretty well.”