Remediating Fractured Streams and Drained Swamps in the Southern Coalfields of NSW, Australia

• In Event: Remediating Remediation: Imagining Alternatives for Assessing and Redressing Environmental Harm - III

Abstract

Remediation can be considered within a mitigation hierarchy applied to manage mining impacts so as to address environmental sustainability. A mitigation hierarchy is featured in the governance framework for Longwall Coal Mining in the Southern Coalfields of NSW, (Australia). Coal mining companies are required by legislative degree to apply ‘best management practice’ to ‘avoid, minimize, remediate or off-set’ environmental harm.
My case study reveals remediation strategies applied to the fracturing and draining of streams, many within drinking water catchments, as a result of surface subsidence induced by longwall coal mining beneath. Those remediation strategies include the injection of grout and polymers into fracturing stream beds, the cutting of strain-relief slots into rockbars and the ‘do nothing’ option based on an expectation of self-healing. The science of remediation in the stream setting is novel and contested, and even more so when applied to stream headwater swamps. Prior to cracking and desiccation caused by mining, such swamps seep water constantly and cumulatively to keep a healthy hydrological balance in the landscape even in droughts.
The evolving experimental practice associated with the remediation of what is both a coalfield and a drinking water catchment has caused controversy, with experts, public inquiry commissioners and anti coal activists disagreeing about the effectiveness and the morality of its implementation. STS provides an excellent vantage point to consider, in a transdisciplinary fashion, the technical, social and political dimensions of the remediation debates, with this situated case study providing a pivot for a more global and view.

Author

• Sharyn Beverley Cullis, UNSW