Doomed
A golden winter's afternoon under the rail bridge at Meadowbank on the Parramatta River. But wait...what's that smoke across the river at Rhodes? It's the former site of Union Carbide, manufacturer of Agent Orange. So polluted is the site that the owner (NSW Govt) has been cooking the topsoil in the belief it will render the stuff safe...
No where else in the world has such a toxic site been remediated for residential use. Little wonder fishing in the adjoining Homebush Bay is banned for a zillion years.
There is a book - Five Minutes Past Midnight in Bhopal - which tells of an incident by Union Carbide operations in India some years ago. It is scary, scary stuff. It amazes me that any government would even consider this area for residential use.
Posted by: Gail | June 20, 2008 at 05:23 PM
There's no way you'll ever get me living there!
Posted by: Bec | June 20, 2008 at 11:17 PM
I ride past this site every now and then. On most occasions, it stinks. Really stinks.
Back in 1998, I had a flatmate that worked on the Maralinga cleanup and the Homebush Bay olympic site cleanup. As he told it, he'd prefer to live at Maralinga than Homebush.
Posted by: BB | June 21, 2008 at 06:46 PM
We have residential on one of the most polluted sites here in Dublin.They scraped a bit off the top, but who knows what will leach into the apartments over the next decade.
The developer will be in the Bahamas by then.
Posted by: John McCartney | June 22, 2008 at 08:12 AM
Adelaide has several housing developments built on top of former industrial dumps.. One such estate got in the media not so long ago after black sludge that stank and stung the eyes with fumes started rising up in the backyards.. They grudgingly moved some of the residents, and "rehablitated" the yards by digging down about a metre, laying black plastic, and covering with fresh dirt.. brilliant.
Now they are going to build the new hospital -The Marjorie Jackson-Nelson Hospital, aka "The Marge" (I am serious, that's what it's called..), on top of polluted railway shunting yards that has surface pollution, ground water polution -they are spending X million dollars to "rehabilitate" the site..
And nobody voted for it, it wasn't mentioned before the election, etc etc..
Don't you love "Representative Democracy" ? Who does it "represent" ??
Posted by: Goldstein | June 22, 2008 at 04:54 PM
is that a guy fishing in the first photo? they have signs all along the waterfront from the rhodes side, DO NOT FISH..
Posted by: art | June 24, 2008 at 07:03 PM
Art, sure is. Maybe they're just sports fishermen, catch 'n release?
Posted by: adrian | June 25, 2008 at 04:24 AM