Tom Doig - Hazelwood

VOID

From the floor of the open cut, the rest of the world disappears. Steep banks of coal and clay rise up on all sides, forty storeys high. In places, the desolation gives way to wild beauty: thick tangles of pine, eucalyptus, brambles and grass, swarming up the hills. Its like standing at the bottom of a valley gouged by a glacier. The mine is larger than the size and depth of Uluru (Ayers Rock), although it would be a better fit if you turned the great rock upside down, the mine owner, Engie, boasts on its website. Engie Group known until 2015 as GDF Suez is the largest electricity company in the world.

In mining-industry speak, the Hazelwood coalmine is a void. The Hazelwood void is so large 7 kilometres long and 4 kilometres wide that it creates its own microclimate. The space left by 1 billion cubic metres of disappeared land can be a couple of degrees cooler at the bottom than at the top. On freezing winter nights, fog forms in the emptiness before seeping out towards Morwell. The town sits in the centre of the Latrobe Valley region and is home to 14 000 people, nearly a century of proud mining history and some of the worst disadvantage and inequality in Victoria. But from the bottom of Hazelwood, you cant see anything of Morwell. All you can see is the mine.

At a lookout on a ridge just east of Hazelwood, visitors can peer down into the void, where vast dark terraces of coal are criss-crossed by light-grey roadways and switchbacks. These cliffs are known to the miners as the northern batters. They look half natural, half artificial, a cross between an amphitheatre and a canyon. Hazelwoods northern batters alone are 3 kilometres across and 130 metres high: as tall as the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and more than three times as long.

From the lookout its also painfully obvious how near the northern batters are to Morwell township at the closest point, less than 400 metres. The only thing separating the town from the mine is the four-lane Princes Freeway and the grass struggling to grow on either side of it. Morwell is roughly the same size as Hazelwood mine. Were it not for the highway, it might be difficult to tell where the mine stops and the town starts, where the void ends and life resumes.

The Hazelwood open-cut brown-coal mine caught fire on the afternoon of 9 February 2014. It burned out of control for forty-five days more than 1000 hours. Workers were still putting out the last of the fire in early June that year. Toxic smoke and gases choked the Latrobe Valley, where more than 70 000 people live within 20 kilometres of the mine. Carcinogenic brown-coal ash fell well beyond the Valley, as far away as Warragul, 50 kilometres to the west, and Sale, 60 kilometres to the east.

Short-term health problems included stinging eyes, sore throats, headaches, chest pains, difficulty breathing, rashes, nausea, metallic taste in mouth, diarrhoea, vomiting, bleeding noses, bleeding gums and bleeding eyes. An estimated twenty-three deaths resulted from the fire. The medium and long-term health effects remain to be seen.

The mine fire was one of the worst industrial disasters Victoria has ever experienced. It may also prove to be one of the worst public health disasters in Australia. It was a worlds first in terms of prolonged adverse air quality, according to the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria. Environment Victoria described the smoke as possibly the worst incident of environmental pollution in our states history.

But the fire was foreseeable. The disaster was preventable.

For six-and-a-half weeks, tens of thousands of ordinary people across the Latrobe Valley were forced to live with fire, with smoke, with ash and uncertainty and terror. In the months and years that followed, an angry community fought back against corporate negligence and government indifference. An independent inquiry into the causes and consequences of the disaster was opened, then closed prematurely, only to reopen as four even more wide-ranging inquiries. Pressure built on all sides, until French-owned multi national giant Engie/GDF Suez was eventually forced to shut Australias most-polluting power station and mine.

What follows is a series of intensely personal snapshots, part catastrophe, part everyday life: brief glimpses into the experiences of the people in the Latrobe Valley who suffered the worst and fought the hardest.

A massive puff of smoke

Simon Ellis sat out on the front verandah of his Morwell house with his younger brother Robert and his seven-year-old daughter Charity. The Ellises drank glass after glass of Coke, weathering the 40-degree heat and 50-kilometres-an-hour north-westerlies as best they could. Simons house was near the top of a hill and faced south, with views over the pink and green rooftops of Morwell. Across the street on the left, a pair of short, bushy trees framed the Hazelwood power station.

It was a brutally hot day and the sky was a vivid, cloudless blue. The two days before, on Friday and Saturday, Simon a pink-cheeked, round-faced, big-bellied Brit had been working as a chef one hour away in Clayton. His brother called him at work on Saturday morning and told him to get home: there was a fire in nearby Hernes Oak, and people in Morwell were just up and leaving. But by the time Simon made it back that afternoon, there was no smoke to be seen. The Country Fire Authority had the Hernes Oak fire under control and the danger seemed to have passed.

While Simon and Robert sipped their Cokes and tried to chill out, Charity went and played on the lawn with the kids from next door. Suddenly Simon saw a puff of smoke on the horizon, a massive cloud coming out of the trees to the south of Hernes Oak, near Driffield: It was as if someone had lit up a giant cigarette.

Since it was a total fire ban day, he called triple zero straight away. It was 1.03 pm on Sunday 9 February 2014.

Theres a fire just started, Simon told the operator in his Birmingham accent. Ive seen it happen just now in the hills on the other side of the Strzelecki Highway.