Editorial: More shortcomings in Mapua saga

OPINION: Another official report, another bunch of unanswered questions: the saga of Mapua's contaminated chemical site limped on a little further this week, with another display of officialdom falling short in properly accounting for serious shortcomings in the clean-up process.

The Ministry of Health's assessment of the public health risks arising from the decontamination work continues the trend of the authorities failing to confront head-on the concerns many people have developed about Mapua. In fairness, the ministry can hardly be castigated for the inability of its investigators to draw meaningful conclusions about whether or not people near the site were poisoned by pollutants released during the clean-up. It was not involved in the work and the sort of data it would need to make robust findings is not available.

Similar uncertainty was highlighted by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment back in 2008 in her assessment of the decontamination work.

It is worth recalling that the commissioner's conclusions were hotly disputed by some of those closest to the clean-up and not exactly embraced by the previous government, which liked to pretend that Mapua would be a "model" for such projects. But her concern that some people living near the site could have been exposed to dangerous chemicals inadvertently released during the work is not ruled out by the health ministry study, even if the actual risks may never be known and could have been negligible. Such hedging will be cold comfort to those who are faced with ongoing anxiety about what really happened.

While some have labelled the ministry's less-than-conclusive report a "whitewash", that seems unduly harsh. But the ministry does need to be challenged on aspects of its approach. The production of the report dragged on for too long, the notice given of Monday's meeting to release it was too short, and it is now launching into another long period of consultation and further report writing before anything more is going to happen. It seems reluctant to give blood tests to those who might have been affected, with conflicting opinions about the worth of such testing.

All of this continues to feed the wider impression arising from the Mapua saga, of a bureaucracy which is more concerned with its own processes and political considerations than with responding to serious public unease.

There will be disappointment, too, if anybody hoped that the past few years' heartache and huge expenditure was finally going to remove the blight. The report confirms that restrictions on certain activities on the site should remain in place long-term.

There are those who argue that for all the problems in the clean-up, the removal of most of the contamination from decades of pesticide manufacture far outweighs the problems left behind. The fact remains, however, that the authorities have under-delivered throughout the Mapua project. As important questions continue to go unanswered, that failure to live up to expectations continues.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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Heru Kurniawan   #1   10:29 pm Mar 18 2010

Wew. Excellent post. While authorities may not want to alarm the public they do have a moral duty to warn them of real or possible hazards. Down-playing situations isn’t always the best way to go and in these situations it definitely isn’t.

http://www.mgleizer.net

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