Travellers know they are approaching Wittenoom from the health warnings posted every few kilometres along the roadside. By law, tourist maps must warn you away from the town before you reach it. When you arrive, the signs advise you to keep doors and windows closed.
About 161 000 tons of blue asbestos were mined from Wittenoom by 7 000 mostly immigrant labourers before the mine closed in 1966.
The mineral, also known as crocidolite, is the most fatal variety of asbestos. Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council estimates that the final death toll among mine workers involved in the operation will rise to 2 000, on a par with Bhopal and Chernobyl in the first rank of industrial disasters.
Even so, the 15 remaining residents are determined to stay despite attempts by the government to cut off their electricity, water and telephone lines.
”We’ve got no intention of moving,” says Lorraine Thomas, the town’s councillor and proprietor of its only shop.
The West Australian government has plans to shut down the town entirely, closing its approach roads, demolishing the 25 remaining buildings and even renaming roads carrying its name. In May buildings at the abandoned mine were finally demolished.
But Thomas is sceptical of claims about the health effects of crocidolite, despite the recent deaths of two neighbours from mesothelioma, a virulent cancer caused by asbestos exposure. She says that testing of airborne particles in the town has shown that levels of asbestos fibre are no worse than in most urban areas in Australia.
The problems that began at Wittenoom have spread around Australia, leaving the country with the world’s worst asbestos disease problem. With a third of the United Kingdom’s population, its annual asbestos disease fatalities of more than 3 000 people match Britain’s death-for-death.
In the optimistic atmosphere of post-war Australia, asbestos seemed to make a lot of sense. The country is dotted with deposits of the mineral, from the crocidolite seams of Wittenoom to the white asbestos lode of Woodsreef in New South Wales, where 500 000 tons of chrysotile were mined before the plant closed in 1983.
A hot, dry country whose post-war motto was ”populate or perish” saw the insulating fibre as the perfect material to build the millions of cheap, cool homes needed to house a population projected to quadruple by 1973. One in three houses built in Australia before 1982 contains asbestos and local slang even has its own word for it, ”fibro”.
The workers allotted to mine the asbestos were mostly southern Europeans. Ivan Ivandich was a 19-year-old Yugoslav refugee in Italy when he signed a two-year work contract to emigrate to the young country. He had little idea that he would end up processing asbestos dust in the 40 degrees Celsius heat of Western Australia’s far north.
”In the first job, I had to go in the mills filling the bags. The dust meant you couldn’t see 5m in front of you. They gave us gas masks, but after a hour the filter was full. I said, Jesus, I don’t think any prisoners in the world have been treated like this.”
He was not the only one alarmed at conditions. Since the late 1940s government health inspectors had warned about the dangers of asbestos diseases at the site, but little had been done by the owners, CSR, to improve conditions.
The mills were poorly ventilated and used second-hand equipment, while workers slept in barrack dormitories and ate in communal tents. For Christmas, their bosses gave them a bottle of beer.
Since the late 1980s CSR has paid out millions of dollars to the victims of the Wittenoom mine, following a court ruling that the company had acted with a reckless disregard for its employees’ safety.
Since 1989 it has settled more than 1 400 claims in Australia and has a further 600 pending, and has established a Aus$324-million fund to pay for these cases and a further 130 000 in the United States, to where many of its fibre-board products were exported.
Ella Sweeney, treasurer of the Asbestos Diseases Foundation of Australia, points out that the tragedy of Wittenoom dwindles into insignificance beside the effects of asbestos manufacturing. Across Australia, 45 000 people are expected to die from asbestos-related cancers before the epidemic peaks in 2020.
For four years in the mid-1970s she worked at a Sydney hospital where she says several co-workers have developed asbestos-related diseases.
”They did a lot of renovations. They took the roof off the maternity unit, put another floor on and put the roof back on.
”Most staff tried to find the quickest way from A to B, so we’d go through that bit of the building. I would go back to the office with white dust in my hair and didn’t think anything of it.”
Two decades after it became obsolete in the building trade, asbestos was only finally outlawed in Australia this year and the money now is not in producing it, but in getting rid of it. McMahon, the Adelaide company that led the clean-up of Wittenoom, has made Aus$100-million in the past 15 years from decommissioning contaminated sites.
For Wittenoom’s remaining residents, that nationwide public health problem means there is little incentive to leave.
”I made a decision based on the facts that as far as living here, there’s a risk to everyone in Australia,” says Thomas. ”There’s a greater risk in Perth than here.” — Guardian Unlimited Â