Giant cuttlefish & fisheries at risk from desalination & industrial development at Point Lowly

http://cuttlefishcountry.com BHP Billiton are expanding their Olympic Dam mine to a massive scale operation in Roxby Downs, South Australia. Not content with drawing 42 megalitres of water from the Great Artesian Basin for free each day (they currently extract 35 megalitres) the mining multinational has proposed to build a desalination plant to supply extra water to the mine. The Point Lowly Peninsula is BHP's favoured location for the plant, due to cost and convenience of location while little effort has been spent surveying the reduced environmental impact of relocating the facility elsewhere.

BHP have rationalised the location by pointing out the speed at which the current moves past the peninsula and the depth of the water, but have failed to pay due attention to the probable accumulation of salinity due to the dynamics of an 'inverse estuary' far from open ocean. The current will sweep the hypersaline waste up the Gulf (into the closed system) and will only disperse the brine towards the open ocean less than half the time it's busy outputting.

Dodge tides are also a problem for the dispersal of hypersaline waste water, and for 3-5 days of every month, the tide is virtually still, allowing great upwellings of saline solution which could easily contaminate the chosen breeding grounds of the Giant Australian Cuttlefish. Nearby fish nurseries including those supporting Snapper, squid and other species are also at risk.

Oceanographer Jochen Kaempf from Flinders University has openly criticised the modelling employed by BHP's Environmental Impact Study, and his knowledge is also accessible here on Youtube, and he is one of man scientists alarmed at BHP's dismissive attitude towards the need for further scientific scrutiny. In this interview, Professor Bronwyn Gillanders of the Earth and Environmental Sciences School at the University of Adelaide details her own intimate experience with the Giant Australian Cuttlefish over ten years of study, including detailing the disastrous known consequences cuttlefish, squid and other marine species can expect if the salinity of the environment around Point Lowly is increased, additional contaminants introduced via increased shipping, and even increased noise pollution underwater during facility construction and operation.

This interview is an extract from the forthcoming danimations documentary film 'Cuttlefish Country'. You can find out more at http://cuttlefishcountry.com

Category:

Education

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• Cuttlefish Country
• desalination
• upper spencer gulf
• spencer gulf
• current
• fisheries
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• BHP
• Olympic Dam
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• environment
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• EIS
• environmental impact
• cuttlefish
• squid
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• Bronwyn Gillanders
• University of Adelaide
• water
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• negligence
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• fishing