Flood debris ‘raft’ on Ghinni Ghinni Creek near Taree

The EPA is cleaning up a ‘raft’ of flood debris including animal carcasses, silage bales and chemical containers in Ghinni Ghinni Creek near Taree.

Transcript

00:00My name is Grace Connor and I'm an operations officer for the EPA in Port

00:04Macquarie. We've had a massive amount of flooding, unprecedented flooding, and so

00:10a lot of debris, a lot of silage bales, which is feed for animals, has been

00:18washed down the river and it's accumulating on the riverbank and on the

00:22the mudflats that you see behind us. So the debris we're focusing on is we've

00:28got some dead cattle and sheep and we've also got oil and chemical drums which

00:33have washed out of farm sheds and then we also have a large amount of silage

00:38bales which are wrapped in plastic and twine and pose like a marine risk. It'll

00:44take months for the whole ecosystem and the river system to recover and it could

00:49be another couple of months for us to completely clean up most of the debris.

00:53So EPA's involvement or our role is to liaise with the cleanup companies

00:57and help them understand what our purpose and what their purpose is in this

01:03cleanup. So focusing first on the cattle and the chemical drums and then moving

01:07on to the the silage bales. Understanding that the natural timbers we want to

01:13leave behind because that's just part of a natural flood event but we do want to

01:17take a lot of the anthropogenic waste away. As the hay is baled it gets wrapped in

01:23plastic and so it's a it's a nice dry container and then as the flood occurs it

01:29gets floated downstream.