“The federal parliament recently launched a inquiry into the Commonwealth government’s management of PFAS contamination in and around defence bases.
While the spotlight has shone fiercely on well-documented issues in Williamtown, near Newcastle, Tamworth Regional Council’s acting director of planning, Ross Briggs, said the plight of local government’s has been overlooked in the inquiry…
‘[It’s] only looking at defence sites, it, for some reason, is not covering sites such as Tamworth airport and dozens of other airports around that were under the control of Commonwealth services,’ Mr Briggs said.
‘Tamworth airport was operated by Commonwealth air services for 32 years.’
He said council, at no stage, was involved in the firefighting drills which it claims led to the current PFAS contamination at the airport, which only became known to council in the last two years.
‘Basically, they’ve said, you’re the landowner, you deal with it,’ he said…
Mr Briggs said council had spent more than $120,000 merely carrying out tests on the Tamworth site…
‘The material is still in the soil at some stage it’s going to have be cleaned-up,’ he said.
‘Whether that’s removal for remediation or onsite remediation, someone’s going to have to foot that bill.
‘At this stage we’ve done testing on what’s there and we’d like someone to pay for that, but we’d also like some help fixing the problem so it doesn’t become an ongoing legacy issue for Tamworth.’ ”
Read the full article by Jacob McAurthur