Image: A past Westconnex protest. Image: Newtown Residents Against Westconnex/Facebook.
By ROBBIE MASON.
Westconnex critics have won a key milestone last week with a review to be undertaken of a controversial report on road tunnel air quality by NSW’s Chief Scientist. The findings in this report have fuelled the NSW government’s refusal to equip the stacks with filtration systems.
The announcement comes amid claims that the report is out of date and complaints from inner west residents that four Westconnex smoke stacks in Rozelle, which are now near completion, poses a significant health threat. Research now shows the health risks from transport pollution are more severe than previously understood.
Welcoming the news, Kobi Shetty MP, the Greens member for Balmain, emphasised community health concerns and publicly requested an open and transparent review process.
“New research shows traffic pollution causes more than 11,000 premature deaths in Australia each year, rather than the previously estimated 2,000,” she said.
Mark Curran, a bio-scientist and founder (also ex-president) of the long-term M5 action group Residents Against Pollution Stack (RAPS), told City Hub that the original report is a “a large-scale whitewash” with poor community consultation.
Curran applauded the announcement of a review and emphasised that “regulation hasn’t caught up with the growth in scientific knowledge” surrounding vehicle-related air pollution.
Beginning in 2014, the Advisory Committee on Tunnel Air Quality, chaired by NSW’s Chief Scientist and Engineer, has produced a number of reports on road tunnel ventilation systems and stack emissions, as well as vehicle emissions.
RAPS and the Asthma Foundation “were supposed to be involved and represented on that group”, Curran said. But those negotiations fell through, precisely because, Curran told City Hub, they were “too inconvenient”. That is, these organisations were a vocal obstacle to the implementation of the Westconnex project.
Curran criticised the NSW Chief Scientist’s report on the dual basis of poor science and poor transparency, stating “all of the parts of the investigation on air quality are written either by the RTA [now RMS] or by people who were long involved in pushing the same sort of story. They’re not independent experts.”
Local community groups such as RAPS and Rozelle Against Westconnex (RAW) favour in-tunnel filtration. Curran told City Hub that this alternative approach has the “double effect” of both reducing costs and absorbing and removing air pollution within the tunnel itself, instead of simply filtering toxic particles through a smoke stack.
Peter Hehir from RAW has also emphasised the economic argument for filtration, highlighting the expensive cost of retro-fitting filtration systems and acting too late in the pages of City Hub.
These community action groups have long platformed the argument that Sydney’s Westconnex tunnel system pales in comparison to similar overseas ventures when it comes to air quality control.
In a 26 page report, last updated in April 2022, RAW claims that its own research “challenges the validity of the RMS’s position on road tunnel filtration and clearly discredits their tendentious and erroneous assertions that ‘filtration is ineffective’, ‘it’s too expensive’ and that the RMS utilizes ‘world’s best practice’ in relation to tunnel design and operation.”
Much of the evidence comes from consultation with experts both in Australia and overseas. Two RAW members have even completed field research trips to the Yamate tunnel in Japan, which the report cites as an example of world-leading tunnel design principles.
As Curran explained it: “it’s amazing what information and what support a community organisation, who are sensible and willing to listen to people, can obtain.”
As evidence for the health impacts of motorway projects, critics have long pointed to NSW Health’s observation of a spike in lung cancer prevalence in Earlwood following the construction and use of the M5 East Turrella stack. The rate of lung cancer in that area increased 44 per cent at a time when it was declining statewide by 9 per cent.
Curran is a longtime Earlwood resident afflicted by chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He said the disease is largely genetic and not directly tied to the M5 East plume, but he stated, “I would prefer not to have that additional irritation working away at my immune system.”
Curran said the “background irritation” is “not what you want to take with your cup of coffee in the morning.”
Westconnex has come under fire in recent years for creating a path of environmental destruction through the city’s inner west and threatening the habits of precious ecosystem including the green and golden bell frog at Kogarah golf club and mature-age heritage trees in Sydney Park. Wendy Bacon’s investigations have revealed that Transport for NSW failed to inform Inner West Council last year about public safety concerns for land in St Peters.
“WestConnex has been an expensive, unsustainable, and destructive project for our local area for many years,” Shetty said, “with lasting impacts now in the form of the four unfiltered exhaust stacks.”
You May Also Like
