Cancers blamed on coal

A truck unloading coal at Vales Point

[Forum] It is of the utmost importance that the people of the Wyong Local Government Area read the facts about Wallarah 2 Coal Mine.

I live in Blue Haven and I was very healthy when I first moved here. Now, I have had three cancers cut out, including a tumour on my eye. The lady next door has cancer, and two people just died that lived across the road from me. That would not even be the tip of the iceberg, because this is all to do with the coal. They have been pumping that much mercury into the air, and fine particles of coal dust that is toxic, it has resulted in Blue Haven having a 16 per cent higher cancer rate than the rest of the state, and now they want to smother Blue Haven in coal dust every time the westerly wind blows.

They want to have four trainloads a day, which takes one and a half hours to load. All the train carriages are open and they will also have an extra stockpile of coal not far away. I can just imagine not only the dust but the noise. Now they want to do this for 28 years. They want to take out hundreds of millions of tonnes. Can you imagine the hole under the ground? The subsidence will cause that much damage to the water catchment area, it won’t be funny.

The people doing this are South Korean and Japanese, so they don’t give a damn what they do to this very important catchment area. I can just imagine trying to do the same thing over there. You would not get to first base. Your paper has been covering the water catchment area but you have not been covering the pollution part. Here is all the evidence you need to do a story on what is happening. It has to be stopped. With your help we might be able to do that.

Letter, May 30 D. Dale, Blue Haven