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Legacy Landfill Remediation with Jayden Pan
222 Plays1 month ago
Jayden Pan is a Legacy Sites Project Officer at Hornsby Shire Council, part of the team responsible for the Foxglove Oval Remediation Project, a legacy landfill in Mount Colah, NSW. Jayden’s role involves managing the complex remediation of this site, utilizing his background in environmental consulting and landfill monitoring.
In this episode, Jayden discusses his journey from environmental consulting to working with legacy landfill sites at Hornsby Shire Council. He shares insights into the Foxglove Oval Remediation Project, detailing the challenges of managing methane gas emissions, leachate, and the environmental impact of old landfill sites.
You will learn about the key steps in remediating legacy landfills, the importance of community engagement, and how Hornsby Shire Council is working to innovate and apply modern solutions to manage contaminated land.
Jayden also highlights the unique complexities of balancing regulatory requirements with practical, site-specific challenges, and how empathy and clear communication are essential when working with affected communities.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Contamination Station, safer environment together, a New South Wales EPA funded podcast. In these episodes, you'll hear from those working to implement contaminated land policies and procedures at the local level by sharing our stories, frustrations, wins and losses. Our aim is for this podcast to become a repository of information that will support those currently working to combat contaminated land and for those yet to come.
00:00:30
Speaker
In today's episode, I'm joined by Jayden Pan. Jayden is a Legacy Sites Project Officer at Hornsby Shire Council as part of the Legacy Sites Project team responsible for the Fox Club Overward Remediation Project, a legacy landfill in Mount Cola, New South Wales.
00:00:45
Speaker
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the host and the guest as individuals, and do not necessarily reflect those of the New South Wales EPA or any other organisation. Hello and welcome to this episode of Contamination Station, an EPA funded podcast. I'm your host, Chanel Gleason Willy, and our guest today is Jaden Pan. Hi, Jaden, thanks so much for your time today. Thank you, Chanel. Glad to be here.
00:01:11
Speaker
It's really great to have you on and to be talking about landfill, little legacy landfill sites, remediation, and your journey to where you are today with Hornsby Shire Council.
Jayden's Career Path and Passion
00:01:22
Speaker
Environmental consulting was where you started your journey in the environmental space. Was that something that you had always wanted to do for a career? I'm going to be completely honest with you. Consulting? No. But contaminated land was something that I I did, yes, in fact, which is not a passion shared by many environmental scientists, but it's certainly something I enjoyed. I've always been interested in in the science, in sciences ever since I was a child. And I've found that, found a passion for environmental science and specifically more, fixing up contaminated land, ah while I was at university in Newcastle after I did a course
00:02:05
Speaker
What was it at university that I guess made you fall in love with it? Because you as you said, it's not common. No, it isn't. There was a course called Environmental Remediation, and which I click with a lot. While it was more focused on mine and rehabilitation being where Newcastle is yeah as part of the Hunter Valley, but also while that was all happening, the BHP steelworks was in the process of being demolished and rehabilitated, um along with a number of other significantly determined sites in and around town. They were very quite visible. And in that time of the late 2010s, a lot of Newcastle was being rejuvenated from post-industrial land into what it is today, much more walkable and I don't know, nice place to live, if you will.
00:02:53
Speaker
So you started off obviously in in that that role of I guess but around about the time that you were coming through university, there would have been a fair number of jobs in that Newcastle region in contaminated land management. What then led you to move into your your current role in council?
00:03:13
Speaker
um Following university, I started um actually joined a consultancy, which predominantly did landfill monitoring. and That was a number of the other the biggest landfills you'd have in in Australia, like Eastern Creek, Lucas Heights, Spring Farm, or Jack Sculley, as it's sometimes referred to. Eligible groundwater, subsurface gas,
00:03:36
Speaker
I had a lot of fun doing that. it had don't Don't get me wrong, it had its challenges. Following on from that experience in consulting, I really kind of liked the idea of being able to make a project my own and have the freedom and will to be able to innovate in whichever way I kind of wanted to take a project. course And being that an asset owner is how you get that. And count Council is the owner of a lot of assets, namely all of its old landfills back when Councils typically were the owners and operators of said landfills.
Council Role: Challenges and Innovations
00:04:19
Speaker
And many of these landfills today are public parks. Being given the flexibility to be able to
00:04:26
Speaker
innovate and bring bring up not only that experience I've got from my consulting days, but also a vision of actually providing something to the community. Even if it's just a local community, that's fine. That's ultimately the dream. And that's what drove me into environmental science in the first place. become Take the world of past legacy policy decisions and whatever, and then make something better out of it.
00:04:53
Speaker
That is a very clear vision of, I guess, why you are where you are, because yeah, there's so many consultants that We do say, you know we we like to think we're innovative, but in reality, when you're having to you know put time sheets in and you know time against projects, it really does curtail that ability to be innovative. Whereas, as you said, when you're working for the asset owner, it allows for that greater scope, and people but a lot more flexibility with
00:05:30
Speaker
spending your time where your passions lie and really going a bit deeper. I actually had this exact same conversation with Anna Lundmark yesterday around innovation and how being a consultant sometimes isn't the best place for that. um and yeah and That's right. one If you're a consultant, one of the easiest ways to when more work is to be cheaper. And if you need to but add time to a project that is dedicated to innovation or research or some different method of doing something that
00:06:05
Speaker
makes time. Time is money in the consulting world. And do you always kind of get that. So with Council, and Council also being a government agency has a lot of resources available to allow for things like GIS. And I use that all the time. And cat Council has a ah huge database of of layers, shape files, and other things that you'd otherwise need to kind of request in such a manner that is not really efficient and using compiling all that data together and putting it into, let's say, for example, a CSM or another way of compiling data that others would be accessible to a consultant coming in from the outside. it means we provided to The needs to provide it. i's think councillor nickrady The consultant give back to the consultant.
00:06:59
Speaker
But in if you bring all that in-house, then you can kind of just do it all and then give a straight hook cons consultant it as a finished product. I think that's really, really useful. Yeah, especially when you've got people like yourself internal to council who understand contaminated land really well and the ah processes behind that and the framework that needs to be followed, that sort of thing.
00:07:20
Speaker
and So let's talk about Foxglove over remediation projects, because that's a significant project in your career. How did you get involved with that project? And I guess when did you start being involved with that one?
00:07:34
Speaker
As you mentioned, the council's internal contaminated land expertise was a bit of a skill gap for a lot of its staff at the time when Foswell started up, which is not uncommon. That's a fairly common thing to have. That's why you have consults. You need technical experts to be able to do these kinds of things. And when it started off, it wasn't the beast that it was going to end up becoming as we'll get to in a second. So I started with Council about a year and a half ago, and right then we're reaching towards the end of the construction of our gas extraction system, get into it in a second. And so while we were compiling a validation report that says, yes, this system has been constructed and does its purpose, I came in right at the end of that.
00:08:32
Speaker
But also following on from the consulting days, I wanted to be the decision maker and a compliant innovation wherever I can to a set of remediation projects and also still while bringing table capabilities to council.
00:08:47
Speaker
okay Can you walk us through the history and the significance of the Foxglove Oval site in Mount Cola and why it became the focus of that remediation?
Foxglove Oval Site: History and Risks
00:08:59
Speaker
The remediation of Foxglove has a bit of history to it. It started off with Life in a Quarry, which I'm going to be fully honest, we don't actually know when it started quarrying, but in 1970, it began life as the Mt. Collar rubbish depot and accepted a produceable waste until its closure in 1980.
00:09:18
Speaker
In 1983, it was developed into a sports ground, rehabilitated into a sports ground to the standard of the day in 1983, and also development was began in the Mount Collar area. Some houses were right but backing right onto the edge of the landfill cell.
00:09:36
Speaker
Well, water quality within the Broward Creek, which is lies downstream of where Fox Club is in the 80s and 90s, prompted a whole of government approach to invest in a range of water quality improvement initiatives, most of which went into Sydney Water's sewage treatment plants. But one of them was actually to construct leachate infrastructure, including an inception trench in 1997.
00:10:00
Speaker
And in 2004, in the heat of the millennium drought, a leachate treatment plant was constructed to reduce council's reliance on potable water for irrigation sources, to instead start using that leachate format. Fast forward 15 years, landfill gas monitoring was conducted on sign as a result of a neighbouring DA triggering a contamination investigation, and then found gas, landfill gas, mostly methane,
00:10:29
Speaker
in the subsurface environment and that prompted the EPA to issue council with a declaration of significantly contaminated land. Council then submitted a voluntary management proposal to the EPA and which we beginning the development of an EMP to then manage the site in a much more structured fashion.
00:10:53
Speaker
So are we at about 2022 now when you've started with the Council? I started with Council of 2023. Oh, 2023, okay. Yeah, so this is all happening before me. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Yeah.
00:11:08
Speaker
And in 2021, a round of ah round gas monitoring, like building gas accumulation monitoring, was conducted in residential houses surrounding the oval. And in the second round, on a very, very rainy day with low barometric pressure, gas was detected. Methane gas was detected inside a residential house exceeding the lower explosive limit of methane.
00:11:37
Speaker
How was that detected? I was using a piece of machinery called a Huberg Laser-1, which is a methane gas detector that is sensitive to down to about 100 parts per billion ah volume of air. If you had imagined it all looking in like a little box with a wand that you wave your wand around to detect andbi ambient methane gas in the air. If you think about it, like the ambient atmospheric composition is 78% or so percent nitrogen, 21% oxygen in thereabouts, and 1% argon and your other trace gases. That's what you typically find. Whereas in this situation, 8% of that was methane.
00:12:33
Speaker
Okay. and Was this in a routine monitoring round that it was picked up or is there...? It was. yeah once but It was. It was part of a part of a DSI, a detailed site investigation, which included relevant receptors.
00:12:51
Speaker
to form what's called a conceptual site model, which is the whole other thing we'll get to in a second. But being a ah potential receptor of contaminants being gas, a number of rounds of ambient gas module was done inside houses around Voslava.
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. and And so it was, it was attended monitoring, was it? Attended monitoring. Correct. Yeah. I'm just interested because you you mentioned that it was a very rainy day. So I was just wondering if there's ah a link there, but maybe you'll get to that.
00:13:22
Speaker
will Okay, so we continue. and That's all good. Because an explosive amount of gas was detected inside a residential property, Fire and Rescue in New South Wales was responded to the scene. Residents were evacuated and ah but evacuated and the neighbouring residents were evacuated the following day from their homes, which is not the situation you want to come out of a contamination investigation.
00:13:49
Speaker
Now, a rainy day, what would happen is there will fall, soil will become something called saturated and that breaks the pathway for gas to move out of the ground and it will find find a way, whichever way it can. Barometric pressure, especially with landfills, legacy landfills is what would typically draw gas out of a landfill. That also happens with active landfills, but That's the way fluid mechanics works with in relation between a lateral cell and barometric pressure is a very complex topic. But in this situation, more often than not, barometric pressure is what draws gas out of a lateral. So the perfect storm of a saturated ground, low barometric pressure, and someone in attendance with a gas monitor cause caused this, unfortunately.
00:14:44
Speaker
So we're now at 2021 and things are really starting to ramp up. It's still prior to your time, but can you run me through what now happens? I guess what thing, COG starts to turn faster and what's going on with this project now?
00:15:01
Speaker
Okay, so we already had, as part of the joke questions, obviously, we had a consultant engaged to do this kind of thing. We ah had already had an auditor engaged for this, and the EPA already knew about this site. so But still, when when you have a site pumping as much gas as this, a lot more alarm bills start going off, obvious reasons. Now, council and EPA recognize that decisive action needs to be taken immediately.
00:15:29
Speaker
to to try and expedite a solution to this through the urban planning system that legislate various legislations. So EPA actually issues count council a cleanup notice to assist us with that.
00:15:45
Speaker
and the expedited construction of a remediation. That came in the form of a number of investigations to design a gas extraction system. That gas extraction system was was installed. It consisted of a number of collection bores, which are is most basic form, a big borehole, about 250 millimeters in diameter, filled with aggregate and a perforated pipe that goes inside it. And the gas, and that will interrupt the flow of gas between the source, the pathway and the receiver. So if you would put but yourself to the context of where you have gas coming out in a residential house,
00:16:26
Speaker
you have to remove the risk. that's the The risk is gas. So you have your source, which is the landfill. You have a pathway, which is linked between the the landfill and the receiver, which is the house. In an emergency situation, you've got to do what you can with what you have. So you actually remove this a receiver. But ultimately, what you want to do is take away the pathway so that gas cannot move between between the two the source and the receiver.
00:16:53
Speaker
as the last gas extraction system comes in. so as As I mentioned, it's a big borehole filled with aggregate, like a coarse aggregate, which allows a free movement but movement of gas and vents it up to the atmosphere. Now unimpeded venting of methane gas have directly to atmosphere. It see doesn't sound like the greatest option, but we sit in this annoying little Goldilocks zone of it's not enough gas to actually do anything with, so we can't install like a power station or something and flare it off or something. But there's too much of it to determine to be not a risk. And so the only other option you've got is just to vent to
Monitoring Methods and Site Geography
00:17:35
Speaker
atmosphere. And that alleviates the risk of flammable gas in confined spaces like a residential home.
00:17:40
Speaker
So how long was it before the all this took place and residents could move back in? residents moved in at the end of 2022, which most importantly happened before the completion of construction. So what actually, oh, oh sorry, remediation construction is the construction of the remediation system in this context. And what happened is once we, a number of wells were installed, like monitoring wells were installed along the boundary of the landfill cell in the house.
00:18:14
Speaker
and Once those boreholes were drilled, the concentrations of gas took a nosedive. Then once that happened, we also developed an emp which ah i'm sorry environmental management plan for the residential homes to allow for the laughing people live in them. And there's a lot of there is a lot of conditions on those EMPs, they're a bit quite odorous, but ultimately you can live with one. And it's a confronting scene for a lot of people to hat to be restricted in what you can do in your own home, which is completely understandable. That's not lost on us at all.
00:18:58
Speaker
But it's things like you can't dig a hole in the back of your house, in in your backyard. You can't have a lip match right on the ground, sir right on the soil surface. And there are gas monitors also in those homes. And so at this point, it's worth noting that community engagement needed to be significantly ramped up because it is quite a This is emergency and communication of key technical concepts need to be explained in plain English. So they need to be explained in plain English in a manner that ah residents and non-technical people can understand. yeah Council did engage a communications expert
00:19:47
Speaker
to communicate between, to go between the technical experts and our and our consultants, which they're very good, but they're also very technical and it can be very cumbersome on the community to understand. And it's worth noting that these people built their houses in the 1980s and lived with them for 40 years. So they're saying people built their houses still live in those houses.
00:20:14
Speaker
and they never had an issue. yeah Although after a little while they wanted to mention that their son would drop matches down a stormwater drain and wait for a boom. but they But they waited till towards the end to relinquish that information.
00:20:31
Speaker
But regardless, they lived they lived in these houses for lived in these houses for many, many years, decades, and without issue. And so suddenly, say, 40 years down the track, this is now an issue, it's quite confronting. Yes, because it's not just the knowledge of the issue, is it? it's There's then the impact on, I'm assuming, the EMP would have been put into a covenant over the titles of the properties, and or am I wrong, were they were they not?
00:21:02
Speaker
Yes, but the EMP employees, yes. However, though the EMPs are designed in such a manner where they will evolve with the changing conditions of the of the remediation on the site. okay yep And once we solve it and prove there is no risk, those EMPs will be there removed and then no controls will be required or whatever. And the role of community engagement was very important because Ultimately, Council operated the landfill. Council didn't do anything about the landfill in the past. We didn't fully understand the risk and it was all done to the standards of the day back in 1983. Landfill guidelines, I think in the first edition existed in 1996 and then updated in 2016.
00:21:52
Speaker
but None of those controls existed or studies that you'd put into a landfill today were done back then because no one really knew how to manage them. and There was no regulation and there there's no regulation ah around how you do these things back and back in those days when we operated these landfills.
00:22:14
Speaker
so Under the ENPs, could you explain what's the ongoing requirements in any more detail for residents? The requirements requires the residences wait e by design, are meant to be minimal.
00:22:29
Speaker
and we We put as much of the emphasis on on council to act on the controls of that EMP. So one thing is called the Residential Area Monitoring Program, also known as the RAMP. We do very good and creative names for these things because we are scientists.
00:22:51
Speaker
And that is, at one point it was, when it started off, it was daily monitoring of wells were being installed. So it started off at nine, and now we're at 47 wells. And then slowly it was brought back to biweekly, then weekly, and then month, and then now we're at fortnightly at the moment. And that includes plugging a landfill gas analyzer.
00:23:17
Speaker
into these wells and see if they're moving around. So you know the the purpose of that monitoring program is it. had actually changed over time. First, it was for the monitoring of these EMPs. Now it's actually used for the monitoring of but sorry to as a guy data data gathering exercise to reinforce the validation of remediation. So just basically say, this system is operating well, and this is why. Here's the data to say say that it is. And some of the other controls on these EMPs are
00:23:52
Speaker
As I mentioned, there are gas monitors inside there. They are unattended monitoring. So they just but just sit in the corner of the room and they monitor for methane or landfill gas ingress basically, methane, carbon dioxide, the typical landfill gas indicators. And there's ah a number of physical controls like For example, you can't do hot works in the back of your garden. You can't weld in your backyard. You have to take it to the front yard. yeah You can't dig holes. If someone were to try and... There is a sewer line that runs through it. If you want to service the sewer line for all stormwater connections, then you need to treat it as fetching a confined space. And ensure you don't, too and because of the potential landfill gas,
00:24:42
Speaker
ingress. However, a lot of these controls will be taken away as as we approach the end of validation with this gas system. Yeah. And you've also got leachate monitoring and and management going on. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
00:24:58
Speaker
Correct. So right at the start, we mentioned that we had an EMP on this site. So there's three EMPs we're talking about. There's two, one one each for those houses and one for the site itself. And the EMP has monitoring requirements as a result.
00:25:15
Speaker
These are groundwater sampling and subsurface gas sampling, which basically tells us what's going on and underneath the ground. Groundwater is typically how dissolved contaminants can move between solid and liquid media and then potentially even come to the surface when groundwater does seep into the surface. We have The gas monitoring is basically what happens between the soil surface and the water table to tell tell us whether or not gas is actually meat making it to the surface. And we even have s surface gas monitoring as well, which goes over the top. Again, with this gas, this laser that I mentioned before, it will walk across the top of the oval to determine if there's any gas seeping out of the sittingpping over top of the oval.
00:26:01
Speaker
which typically is not but u so which is not the case. The Oval is actually one of our most popular sporting fields in the Shire because it's an all-weather field. And so managing all the all this stuff going on, as well as all the sporting users and everyone else who wants to use a ah local public park, which in the geography of Mount Coler, it's very mountainous. There's not many flat surfaces. And yet here's this that massive big oval which everyone takes advantage of. But and another interesting aspect of the surface gas monitoring is that we monitor a lot of our but of subsurface utilities because they can form a pathway for gas to move. Because when you when you dig a trench, you form disturbed land and you might fill that trench with an electrical conduit with wires and pipes and
00:26:57
Speaker
and to fill it with with sand, which is, of course, the grained aggregate, if you will. And that allows for the preferential pathway of gas to move more freely through a trench or a pipe. And then it can pop up somewhere from time to time. And every now and again, we'll find a gas coming out of the out of the surface at a what is not considered explosive, but it will be like above a certain criteria set by the EPA.
00:27:25
Speaker
And that will look back through historical imagery and find there was actually a light pole there once upon a time that was demolished like 20 years ago. bra and we go Oh, okay. that's That's the cause of that because it's the electrical utilities are actually still there and they're forming a pathway for the gas. But it's in it's in the middle of a bunch of bushes, so it's actually not forming any risk to anyone unless someone were to is ah no it's not It's well below anything that would be considered flammable. So we don't really consider it a risk. There's also monitoring of surface water. So there's a number of stormwater drains that discharge directly into... but So come to the surface and form the creeks around the area, up which
00:28:13
Speaker
come aspects where the groundwater does come out. As mentioned before, the geography of this area is very, very steep. And so there's a lot of interconnection between the groundwater aquifers, perched water, and the surface water creeks that flow from the site from the site and the local area down into the Broward Creek catchment. And the surface water is surface water points taken to different areas will tell will tell us if leak shade is making its way out of the aquifer, if it's in the aquifer, out of the aquifer, and into surface water points at which point, and how that interacts with the the rest of the environment and other ecological receptors that exist within it.
00:29:00
Speaker
And we also, as we mentioned before, we install a leachate treatment plant, which is then mixed with is treated to a standard that is suitable for irrigation. And we sample a number of sections.
00:29:13
Speaker
a number of areas between each of the leachate plant to, one, determine how how it's working, if it's working at all, if it needs a service, or and ultimately that's the next phase of our voluntary management proposal. We need to then upgrade the leachate plant to a higher standard because it's 20 years old now and it's reaching the end of its lifespan. It needs an upgrade.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, right. So is there anything which if you were to go back in time and you were involved with the closing down of the landfill and I guess knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?
Past Oversights and Modern Challenges
00:29:57
Speaker
First thing I would have done, it wouldn't have allowed development to occur anywhere within 500 metres of a landfill cell. That's number one. And I'm pretty sure the the modern the modern day landfill guidelines state that you must develop within that area.
00:30:12
Speaker
that is something I would have done. But want to go and when it comes to surprising, I was surprised that legacy planning systems actually allowed for the development so close to a landfill cell. then yeah You can look at it with hindsight of what we know today and go, what were they thinking?
00:30:28
Speaker
but but You're taking the context of the what they did in the day. They didn't know. They didn't understand that these things were issues. and Or if they did, then they didn't they weren't it wasn't regulated. you were There were no controls in place. And looking to be honest, the way development was done back in those days, it's to a very different standard to what it is today. Yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker
And so that's that's how a lot of the or these houses were built, better or for worse. Some of the other surprising things I've found is the the role of dissolved phase transport of methane gas. So what will sometimes happen is methane gas will dissolve into the groundwater. Now, when I left university, I did a lot of chemistry and it was really drilled into me that methane being a non-polar molecule does not mix with water, which is a polar molecule. So the idea that the two can actually work and dissolve into the other was a bit foreign to me.
00:31:31
Speaker
but It can happen and it can degas based on something called partial pressure of gas of gas in the environment. The best way of describing what that means is when you open a bottle of Coke or a lemonade and it will degas all the carbon dioxide that was dissolved in the soft drink. That's the exact same concept but instead with methane,
00:31:57
Speaker
dissolving out of groundwater. And that groundwater environment might change based on where it is, like if it were to suddenly come to the surface at a river. Or if you were to, in this instance, drill a well into the bedrock, and then that then forms a void and allows for a pathway of gas to, a pathway of dissolved phase gas to come out of the aquifer. But in reality, there's actually no pathway for it to come in otherwise. so So, what the in the yeah the effort of actually monitoring for gas, you've therefore created the pathway for gas to be monitored. And it's a self-sensoring prophecy.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah. And a very difficult conceptual site model then to keep, I guess you would have had many iterations of it as you went through which the ah process. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And when it comes to conveying a conceptual site model and baking that into an EMP, which you then need to give to a resident who could have any kind of and you kind of professional background from highly technical specialized to someone who does not do that at all. You need to you to break it down in a really good manner. Pictures are really good. yeah Diagrams, bullet points, simple language. These things are very good, which I noticed that, especially during my consultant days, some conceptual site model will be a wall of text. And you go, okay, what does this actually mean? And it's not very clear.
00:33:31
Speaker
or is When you're doing them and need to make them publicly facing, you need to make sure you can actually communicate that in a manner that is really, really easy to digest for even the most technophobic luddites of the
Community Engagement and Communication
00:33:51
Speaker
world.
00:33:51
Speaker
So you did an awful lot of community education and consultation by the sounds of it. What sort of techniques were employed and how did the community as a whole respond? I guess what were some of the opinions that were coming out?
00:34:09
Speaker
yeah Council engaged a ah communications manager that specialised in pollution incidents and how to communicate that into to the community and what's really important is that dairy two is a school so There's two things you have. do You have perceived risk and actual risk. And perceived risk can go can go as far as your imagination can allow it to go. Whereas the role of community engagement in this context is to try and narrow it down and make it as specific as possible to produce that perceived risk
00:34:49
Speaker
to reflect exactly what the actual risk is. And we had to basically employ and a number of values that we had to... We we employed a number of values when we we had communications being brought out to the community. Accountability.
00:35:06
Speaker
transparency, consistency, clarity, and by far most important, empathy. Which is not something you typically come across in a contamination investigation or project, but sometimes you've got to work with a hand you're dealt. And if you lose the community, it's very one, it's very hard to get them back and bring them back to the table and work with them. And two, the role of council as a whole is to serve the community. That's what local government does. And so we it was really important for us to maintain the community to be on our side. and So simple, consistent language at all times, keep communication short to the point, lots of visual diagrams, very helpful, usual label analogies that are commonly understandable by by it everyone as much as possible.
00:36:00
Speaker
and When you have such a what can seem most threatening almost to an issue like we have when, as you mentioned, people were evacuated from their homes. They weren't allowed to return to their homes, which is very, very confronting. It's paramount that whenever something changed on site, we had to be on the front foot. We had to basically tell everyone Hey, this is going to, we're doing this, this new investigation. This is why, this is how it impacts you. This is how it relates to the whole project and to really um down dial, prevent that perceived risk from ballooning out.
00:36:42
Speaker
the So balancing that transparency with the technical complexity and communicating that, I guess, in a timely manner with with the public. Did it work?
00:36:56
Speaker
really well. were Were you able to to manage that that perceived risk? Were there times where maybe you learned something which you can pass on? I think our consultants learned a fair bit about communication skills at the end of the time of this project.
00:37:16
Speaker
um But when balancing technical complexity and being related and transparency, it's it really is just comes down to don't try and hide anything. Don't try and don't do something that someone might see is wrong.
00:37:32
Speaker
Oh, not wrong. ah so It's so a change a change in the position that you've already made, unless you absolutely have to. So this came to times when late 2022, early 2023, there was a time of ah it's she a serious labor shortage in the construction industry, and that did affect this project. and so And also, when you're drilling through but things like landfills, it can be a very unpredictable drilling condition. It's very difficult. And you need to have basically all the gear available ready to go. And slide the slightest mishap can change a lot.
00:38:10
Speaker
And that happened here. There was a time it was a point in time where we had to adjust the timeframe for one reason or another, one of them being difficult with drilling conditions and availability of certain techniques availability and certainty techniques and technology within within Australia, which did hamper this. And it forced us to go to the residence and say, hey, we said you could move in by this point in time.
00:38:36
Speaker
That's not happening anymore. And this is this is why, this is how, this is what the issues that we've come across and be completely transparent with them about ah bad exactly why that happened. Because we because ultimately, you you're delivering them bad news.
00:38:52
Speaker
no and news that they really didn't want to hear. Again, empathy and also like to put yourself in their shoes for a moment when you're dealing, when you're when you're talking to people are dealing with bad news. How do you think they're going to receive it and to base your communication around that? and Was it up to the council to assist these residents with temporary accommodation or or relocation?
00:39:21
Speaker
Absolutely, at all times. Council council found a short-term accommodation and then moved them into rentals. And then at some at one point, some of the residents decided that it would be safer to move on. And so Council then actually purchased the houses off the residents. Council is not in the business of being property moguls.
00:39:44
Speaker
yeah but But in this instance, that that that was justified. and And so once we received the validation of it all, we're looking to on-sell that back on someone else. But ultimately, what we what would we provide to the residents were these are options. We have this, this, this, this, this. What would you like to do? And give them their freedom of choice to be able to take what they can out of what is otherwise quite a difficult and difficult decision.
00:40:15
Speaker
m yeah What role did and still does public feedback play in shaping the ongoing work? When we were designing the gas system, it consisted of, it always consisted of 70 bores, collection bores, and it was also meant to have 70 vents on top of each floor. So you got a hole in the ground pipe and it goes all the way up to about yeah seven metres into the air. It's a big black pipe. It's quite unsightly. And when you when you're in the backyard of these these houses, it's in your face. And they were
00:41:00
Speaker
not keen on having 70 black pipes stick it out of the ground. I can understand that. And so one of one of the residents went to their kitchen and got pulled out a bendy straw. And can you just like put it at this, but then they put dirt on grout and put b plants on top? And then I don't think the engineers had ever even considered that, but they go on Yeah, we could do that. And so they undergrounded half the system. So there is still a number of black events and stuff like that, but they're much less, there's half as many. and Sorry, no, Mike Fraser, not half as many, one third of the events. It's more technically complex because you go to bends and berry things and things like that, but that's fine.
00:41:46
Speaker
like we've disturbed these residents enough. We're happy to make a compromise there. And then we we then also gave drafted up a number of different options for like the plants we've got. We need to revegetate that batter because that's how you deal with erosion and sediment controls. And we actually gave the residents an opportunity to, hi, these are what kind of plants we want going to put back in. What would you like to see? Oh, they want to see Christmas bushes. Oh, they want to see I'm a contamination man, I don't know my plants. A number of plants that they want to see, in when they look out the back, they don't see the back of a landfill, they see what is actually a nice... Nice vegetated... now see right It's right? It's still a batter, no matter what what way you put it, with poles sticking out of it. But they still see a number of trees that they chose to put there.
00:42:40
Speaker
yeah not Was there any other community influence into the project's direction throughout the process? The community? is at the forefront of every decision we make. but we There are decisions we make that this project is entirely driven by our BNP and our commitments to the EPA and various stakeholders. right But the community is ultimately the one that's impacted by far the most. And as I mentioned before, Council's job is to serve the community. They don't call it public service for no reason.
00:43:15
Speaker
ah But, and so whenever a decision is made, we often will often consult with stakeholders, being sporting groups, schools, the the residents, and quite often and say, Hey, we're going to do this. This is what that is. We don't intend to, we don't intend to ah impact your site, whatever. And honestly, a lot of that is actually done by council's internal parks team because we're our environment team, they are parks.
00:43:44
Speaker
Yes, we speak the same language and dialect, but they ultimately they bear the wrath of just disappointed community groups. and so whenever Before we do anything, basically we say, hi, we're going to do this out on the site. What do you think about that? And they'll tell us, oh, no, you can't do this. Or you do this on certain days. or don't leave tire traction in all the sports field, please. house yeah yeah And a really interesting aspect came out when we decided to change a ah way we manage weeds on our and one of the batters.
00:44:18
Speaker
it was It's very steep, it's very soft. We used to do it with heavy machinery and it was a health and safety hazard. So we had to had to do the big logistical challenge of closing all the wooden tracks, closing the eyeball and allowing this mulching machine to obliterate all the weeds, which inevitably will spread them further because that's how weeds propagate. So instead, one day we decided, what if we put a herd of goats on this this
Creative Solutions and Project Reflections
00:44:46
Speaker
side? I love it. This is going.
00:44:48
Speaker
And then i would so I went to a number of ah number of internal stakeholders like, can we do this? Honestly, why not? It's not because you do it like this. And then one day, as I mentioned, this is a sports field. So a lot of schools have their latest carnals there. Anchoring at public school was treated to 70 goats being herded across a sports oval into this area. And they and and these these goats annihilated the weeds. It was great.
00:45:18
Speaker
How did have the batter stand up to their hooves? When compared to the option of a 10 ton excavator, quite well. Yeah. That's what we've got to do. And the batter was environmentally degraded. It's been slashed a number of times, just where there's no very minimal ecological value. So like, well, you know, things are destroyed. Why don't we? It's a landfill batter for Christ's sake.
00:45:45
Speaker
but Yeah. And so, but the first thing happened was we had to put up this fence around the, around the batter. And the second they saw a fence, the local football club martial art was like, why is this fancy? Are you taking away out? Are you taking away out how sports field again? Cause we took away the sports fields to build the gas system. And we're like, Oh no, hold up. This is, this is actually for a goat enclosure.
00:46:12
Speaker
And then the suddenly the tension of leave, you had to go, are you serious?
00:46:18
Speaker
Oh, that's great. ah Was it a permanent fence or do you put up temporary fencing for for the goats? It's temporary fencing, but it's going to be there. It's going to be there for a two 18 month trial to see how it goes. How frequently you get the goats there? Once Once a quarter. Yeah. We've only done one event at the moment. They come back next week.
00:46:41
Speaker
ah But yeah, it was, of all things, 70 goats on the side of a council park is not something you typically come across. And this project has been a lot of bad news for the community, understandably. This is a good news story and it really brought the community together and the reception was overwhelmingly positive.
00:47:04
Speaker
with this. Some that we did put out, there was a number of naughty goats that were small and nimble enough to escape underneath the fence. So we would you know receive phone calls from community members and say, hey, Clarence has gotten out. Like, who's Clarence? Oh, you've named the goat Clarence.
00:47:25
Speaker
Yeah, as I mentioned, this is a very, very often, not often, frequently used sporting fields. So, and in the middle of athletes carnival season, so all the school, all the local schools got to got a chance to see it. All the all the local sporting groups, soccer, like touch 40, they all got a chance to, so this I feel a little bit sorry for the teachers who had to try and corral the kids back into ah focusing on what they were actually there for.
00:47:51
Speaker
ah yeah yeah Yeah. But ultimately that was ah there was a really funny, really fun, good news story that everyone was able to get behind. Hmm. I, I've only ever seen, I guess on a commercial scale, goats used for that once before, which was on River Cottage, actually. Did you get, I guess, were they special goats? Like were they, were they trained at all? Or was it just a ah herd of goats owned by somebody fairly local?
00:48:22
Speaker
was I heard of goats by someone very local and they are special in that they've been raised around people and been domesticated, but that's the only real special thing about them. There are a variety of different breeds and he gets them from all kinds of different places. A lot of them are rescue pets that have been neglected. Some are even, if you could believe it, bush goats that he captions for other local councils who have goats ah feral goats running around in their nature reserves. One of them was a bunch of them actually from a quarry up on the settled coast. They would jump all over the ah mining utes and so might the quarry managers were like, get these things out. And he came around and captured them, domesticated them, gave them all the vaccinations and then put them out to work.
00:49:14
Speaker
yeah That's great. We have a huge mob of feral goats that are that reside in the hills around Tamworth where I live. Maybe there's a better use for them. I know a guy.
00:49:34
Speaker
So last question, ah in your experience, what are the critical factors that determine the success of a remediation project in a densely populated area? I'll fall back on the on the values that I mentioned before. Accountability, transparency, empathy, consistency, and clarity. Knowing you're in the public public eye at all times is key. Now, in my consulting days, I've spent a lot of time on big infrastructure projects with billions of dollars being invested into them.
00:50:05
Speaker
And a lot of high impact like in your face kind of works happening, jackhammers, piling rigs, things like that. And more a quite often they'll hide behind a facade or a yeah a a literal facade or a ah wall. Whereas we don't get that privilege where we are in people are in your face.
00:50:31
Speaker
ah we're in people's face, I should say. And so you fall back on those on those principles whenever you communicate with the community, you shouldn't go wrong. It's it's important to communicate, as we mentioned, actual risks versus perceived risks, and that will alleviate much of the community's risks. Especially it's you and if you if it's densely populated,
00:50:57
Speaker
everyone's seeing it, people allow their imaginations to run wild. So it's really important to get in the front foot and alleviate those alleviate those concerns early on.
00:51:09
Speaker
Yeah. And people talk as well, which... Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I guess the form of Chinese whispers goes on. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that's why... And so we used a number of methods of communication. We had a website. We had a website that was basically Placer on every single notice board we put up. There's signage everywhere. There is a number that you can call directly to Council's customer service team.
00:51:37
Speaker
there is frequent updates. like The residents that were affected would receive nearby initial initially initial proximity to the affected residents, would have weekly updates with Council as to how worship progressing, timeframes, challenges, roadblocks,
00:51:57
Speaker
purposes of investigations, all that was communicated in very in very clear terms. And the broader community, like every people have a few streets away and things like that, they would see the monthly letterbox drop as to what is happening on the site and how it's progressing you um in a bit more of a digestible manner compared to the people it immediately affected. And importantly, it's important to maintain trust. If you lose trust, it's hard to get it back.
00:52:26
Speaker
And if people are doing remediation, usually you're doing remediation because you've got a problem, like you've got some toxic soil or you've got some gas issues or you've got a petrol station that's leaking petrol everywhere and people's imaginations are on wild. So make sure you maintain the trust, have the evidence in front of you, but also an indigestible manner that's relatable to them, but that people can understand.
00:52:53
Speaker
and then people will sometimes even get behind you. so Is there anything else that that you wanted to say that we haven't covered? Yes, actually. One of the one of the biggest challenges we faced on this project, besides green perception, is actually the adaptation of modern design and management principles of the landfill to legacy infrastructure, show which, to be really honest, is not done well.
00:53:21
Speaker
no it's not done well It's not regulated well. There is little literature out there as to how to actually manage these things. There's plenty out there for operational site where you're designing it from the ground up. You line your cell, you install your gas system, you leach out plants already already assessed, you you're regulating what kind of waste comes into your facility.
00:53:42
Speaker
and you have certain performance objectives for e each of those there many moving parts. This was glorified a hole in the ground with the layers all on top. but And so when it comes to applying modern regulation to sites like this, it's no mean feat. And it is possibly very expensive. It's time consuming.
00:54:09
Speaker
And I'll be honest with you, a lot of it doesn't isn't really relevant. Like for example, if you have if you have gas coming out of the surface gas emissions coming out of the ground,
00:54:23
Speaker
The trigger level in the solid waste landfill guidelines of 2016 by the New South Wales EPA is 500 parts per million. And the guidelines don't actually state why they've set it at 500 parts per million. I'm assuming it's because of, chances are you've got a leak and your gas is not being directed to your gas extraction system correctly.
00:54:48
Speaker
But at the same time, if you're applying these guidelines to a legacy site in lieu of any other guidance, you don't have a gas retraction system in the first place. And so what does that actually mean? Where is the risk? Is the risk is their risk actually there?
00:55:04
Speaker
ah Yes, no, maybe. You don't know. Suddenly, you've triggered a big a big investigation that's ballooned out in scope, and then the cost comes in. and That's when the dollars start rolling into the these projects. So, there's I guess you're talking about the the need for health-based investigation or trigger levels, is that correct?
00:55:28
Speaker
I wouldn't say health-based. I would say appropriate. Okay. What that looks like, I'll be honest with you, I don't know. I'm not a natural practitioner or am I a metal gas expert? But I believe an aspiring goal would be to have a guidelines develop ah set of guidelines developed to be able to account for legacy sites or sites that don't have I don't have the added infrastructure of you expect to out of a modern facility. Again, gas extraction system, leachate plants, tap that's intact, that's designed and engineered in such a manner that's meant to maintain its integrity. you could you In that respect, you're almost comparing apples and oranges. One is designed to a specification that is designed to stay there, whereas another one is a bit of a backyard job, I'll be honest with you.
00:56:26
Speaker
you interesting There are so many legacy landfill sites out there that there's no practical way to that yeah all of these could be addressed as remediation projects in any sort of realistic timeframe.
00:56:46
Speaker
Correct. And not to mention the cost of doing a lot of these. And like this one was spurred... It comes down to the principle that I can't remember the name of, that you don't know what's a problem until you know what's a problem. And this one, we didn't know gas was a problem until it was.
00:57:07
Speaker
And many other landfills out there where you probably wouldn't know if gas is a problem until you do know. But there's also plenty of landfills in the middle of nowhere that sit by and don't do anything. And so would you therefore apply these modern landfills guidelines to those ones as well? What do you do? Do you do something in between? it's You have to have come up with a tailor-made option that is only applicable to that and cannot be applicable to anywhere else. Are those then made confidential? Therefore, you can't share that between different stakeholders or different people who have these assets they need to deal with. Is this the first time anyone's remediated a legacy landfill?
00:57:44
Speaker
I doubt it, but so some things we do come up with do seem like they've ah quite literally but thought up as an innovative method of managing this site. I'll give an example of that. The validation criteria of these like these boundary wells between the landfill, between the cell and the ah houses, there's three things. There is 1% methane, 1.5% carbon dioxide above naturally established background levels, which is directly out of the modern landfill guidelines. The third one is actually a 90th percentile of change in methane concentrations from the established background of the historical dioxide. If you exceed
00:58:33
Speaker
the first two, but you don't exceed the other. It means that you've actually got, you've got, well, you might have methane there, but it's not actually changing. It's actually never stopp never changed. So it's not an issue. And and that was that that was quite, that was a new wave method we we established for this project of monitoring, because we know the gas isn't there. It's not going anywhere. and The landfill's, lo and behold, there is a landfill there and it's producing gas. No one could have seen that coming. But what the question is, is it changing? Yeah. yeah yeah
00:59:06
Speaker
and check If that changes, then the risks change. And then that triggers further investigation for characterizing that risk. But we already know what the risk is and and doesn't change then. And it's being managed appropriately. It's being managed. Yeah. Correct.
00:59:22
Speaker
Well, thank you so much again for your your time today. It's been, yeah, as I said, a very entertaining and interesting conversation with you today, Jaden. No worries, thank you. Thank you, Chanel. Lovely being here. Well, that wraps up this episode of Contamination Station. Thanks very much for listening.
00:59:43
Speaker
You've been listening to Contamination Station, Safer Environment Together, an EPA funded podcast hosted by Chanel Gleason Wiley. We hope you've enjoyed our chat and been inspired to continue working towards a safer environment together. We would love for you to stick around for the next episode. So keep those headphones on, grab another cuppa and settle in for more insightful stories.