00:02Kate Tucker's family has farmed this land for five generations and water was once its best asset.
00:10The property is called The Springs and we thought we had really good clean water to present opportunities.
00:18But the property is now polluted with PFAS chemicals and sewage, leaving it without clean water for stock or crops.
00:28Ms Tucker has spent countless hours looking for a solution.
00:33It's so destroying. She's got three beautiful kids and she's putting time in on this.
00:38It's a legacy farm. It's not something that you want to walk away with and say someone else deal with
00:43it.
00:43In the 1980s, part of the farm was sold and turned into an industrial precinct.
00:49As part of that, the family agreed to a sewage treatment plant being built, which discharges into a creek that
00:58runs through the farm.
01:00The plant receives sewage from the industrial precinct and the nearby Launceston airport.
01:07Both have grown rapidly over the past four decades and the plant is now receiving more than three times the
01:14volume it was designed to treat.
01:17Ms Tucker fears that reduces treatment quality.
01:21The results would probably suggest that what is coming out of the discharge point is equivalent to raw sewage in
01:30some circumstances.
01:31She says authorities have been slow to address the plant's problems.
01:36That's because it's among the 33 smaller Tasmanian sewage treatment plants, classified as level one, which sit outside Environment Protection
01:46Authority regulations.
01:48Instead, they're supposed to be managed by local councils, but that doesn't always happen.
01:54We had the expertise to monitor it as a level one activity. It's gone way beyond that.
01:58Taz Water says its priority is to invest in larger sewage treatment plants, like Tea Tree Bend at Launceston.
02:06It's looking to innovation to improve smaller plants.
02:10We've also got floating wetlands in there that also help to reduce nutrients.
02:15He says Western Junction won't be decommissioned for about a decade.
02:20Ms Tucker says that needs to happen sooner.
02:23You can't let infrastructure get to critical point and allow it to continue without investment in that infrastructure.
02:30I think that's what our show is.
02:34We're here for now, after impact, absolutely.
02:34That's all the music plays in relation to, but I still give the feedback.
02:35You can talk about things about what we gave in.
02:35Are you at the world, under people in their langeí, it's closest to you.
02:35Before we help it, please remember this topic.
02:36But today your friends don't operate.
02:36You can handle the silence as opposed to Princess Princess.
02:36Right here, then all the aliens stress.
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