The following is a maintained list of contemporary Australian environmental and cultural incidents that have resulted in destroyed, degraded or damaged notable cultural or environmental items.
The intention of this list is to create a hospitable environment for the contribution and creation of a detailed lineage of intentional and unintentional anthropogenic activities or actors that continue to contribute to the ongoing degradation of Australian and First Nations cultural heritage and environmental sites.
The term incidents refers to any significant human activity, accidental or not, that contributes or creates the conditions in which environmental and cultural heritage is degraded. Conditions of degradation can be determined if the item or event, without human interaction would have sustained itself markedly better.
Entries considered suitable for this article
The incident itself has an anthropogenic underlying cause or interaction The entry does not already have enough notability to warrant its own article, such as the Juukan Gorge disaster.
Fish kills also occurred in late 2022 and early 2023.
Conventional ecosystems
Murray Darling fish kills (2018 and January 2019) Location40 kilometer stretch of the Darling River, both downstream and within Menindee LakesSite DescriptionThe Menindee lakes are 7 adjacent lake systems connected to the lower darling river through a series of weirs, channels and levees. The lower darling constitutes all of the Darling river regulated by releases from the Menindee Lakes scheme, thus the Menindee Lakes system is located at the end of the Darling River. Over 30 species of water birds use the lakes for habitat, including numerous threatened species. The Menindee Lakes play a prominent role in the early stages of native fish lifespan.
The lakes system provides water for numerous towns, including Broken Hill, Menindee and Pooncarie. Due to the flat landscape that makes up the river, along with inconsistent rainfall, flows into the system at the end of the end of darling river are inconsistent. A significant feature of the lakes is the connection with the Lower Darling river via Weir 32, where "Flows into this section of the river support a range of agricultural and environmental assets"
The Darling river has a prominent involvement in Aboriginal culture dating back over 13,000 years. This region is the traditional land of numerous different nations, though the most prominent group is the Barkinji people. Barkindji means people of the Barka (the river). PrecedentThere are significant short and long term factors that contributed to the conditions of the river system causing three mass kill events.An independent panel was commissioned by the Australian government to perform this analysis. The report provided for the Australian Government Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources will make up the majority of the events dissection. Discerning between ultimate causes and proximate causes for the event will provide a more articulate understanding of the context and event of the mass fish deaths.
Ultimate causes:
Large fish recruitment and spawning events
Two large inflow events in 2012 and 2016 resulted in conventionally high biomass levels in Lake Pamamaroo & Menindee Weir pools. "The first was a sequence of high flow events spanning 2010-2012, which filled the Menindee Lakes . After a series of low flow years (2013-2015), in 2016 there was another single significant rainfall event that filled the Menindee Lakes"During high flow events, native fish move both downstream from the northern tributaries and upstream from the River Murray to greater proximity with the Menindee system. When full, the Menindee systems act as vast nurseries for fish. These inflows and high water levels in the years preceding the fish - death event caused a large influx of both algal and fish presence in the systems.
Weather and Water management
After inflow events in 2016, Lake Menindee was considered at complete water levels. In 2017 - 2018 water was released from Menindee into the lower darling. Drought conditions in western NSW developed from 2016 onward, this cumulatively caused the "two-year total Barwon–Darling inflows" to be the "lowest on record over the past 20 years."
Furthermore: "As part of the regular management operations for the lakes, water was released down the lower Darling system and into the River Murray". Without any considerable in-flow events after 2016, alongside the diversion of water from the Menindee pools, weather levels began decreasing below Weir 32, effectively trapping remaining fish within the pools.
Proximate causes / Late 20-18-2019:
As conditions came to arrest water movements between the Menindee system, significant endogenous factors were also beginning to foster the environments that culminated in the 2018-2019 fish kill offs. As the independent assessment panel further notes: "Based on the flow and algal data available, it would be reasonable to assume that persistent thermal stratification occurred in the weir pool from approximately mid-October 2018".This stratification causes a major separation of conditions in the water table..."with high fish and algal biomass in the epilimnion (surface waters) and likely severely hypoxic or anoxic conditions in the hypolimnion (bottom waters)."This stratification led to significant differences in oxygen and temperature levels between the epilimnion and hypolimnion. Algae concentrations most significantly changed during this event, with WaterNSW algal sampling showing very low concentrations of algae between July–September 2018 (none-detected). By 24 November, biomass levels had increased to over 8mm3/L (red-alert level).Incidents and result"Over three separate events between 15 December 2018 and 28 January 2019, millions of native fish died along a 30- to 40-km reach of the Darling–Baaka River adjacent to the town of Menindee, New South Wales (NSW), in the weir pool between Weir 32 and the Menindee Lakes Main Weir (New South Wales Department of Primary Industries 2019)"
Kills in the Darling: assessing the impact of the 2018–2019: mass fish kills on the fish communitiesThe Independent Panel report referenced here (Vertessy, 2019) and the Australian Academy of Science report (Moritz, 2019) concur that the fish death events were caused by destratification of the pool upstream of Weir 32. The three major mortality events occurred on 16 December 2018 and the 6/19th of January 2019. The Independent assessment identifies three cool changes as the trigger for these two events.
Alongside the final report, a preliminary report prepared by NSW Department of Primary Industries after the second fish death event concluded that observed air changes and the subsequent water temperature falls are responsible for initiating major fish kill events.
December
Between the 12th and 16 December a significant cool change disturbed the stratification layers containing distressed fish and algae and widely different chemical and physical conditions. Average water temperature at 60 cm depth decreased from 27.5 °C on the 12th to 23.1 °C on the 16th, alongside rainfall on the 14th and 15 December. The independent assessment panel notes...
"This weather change likely triggered a mixing event that combined very low oxygen bottom waters with the surface waters where the fish were located."
and..
"A change in conductivity that may be due to mixing of surface and bottom waters occurred in the early morning of 16 December 2018"
This abrupt change altered the conductivity, temperature and oxygen saturations considerably, marking the start of the fish deaths that would occur following the 16th. The majority of deaths occurred near Weir 32
January
Upstream from Weir 32 cool changes altered the maximum air temperature from 46 °C on January 4, 2019, to 28.5 °C on January 5. Strong winds and substantial rainfall also occurred, reducing the weather temperature from 30 C on the 4th to 26 C on the 6th. Similar changes occurred on and prior to the two fish kills that occurred in January as demonstrated in the previous event during December.
Although these two events featured headfirst,
"further broader-scale fish kills occurred throughout, 600 km of the Darling–Baaka River as disconnected refuge pools contracted and water quality deteriorated from June 2019 to March 2020."
The exact number of fish deaths is unknown, though the report produced by Professor Rob Vertessy concluded that over a million fish may have died.
Mining and resource extraction related incidents
Whitehaven Coal billion liter water theft (2016–2019) +LocationWhitehaven's Maules Creek mine is located 45 km southeast of Narrabri in north-east NSW within the Gunnedah Basin. Site DescriptionLocated within the Leard state forest, the site continues to operate on and within Gamilaraay land and cultural sites. Leard state forest is noteworthy for containing the "most intensive and intact strands of nationally listed and critically endangered Box-Gum Woodland remaining on the Australian continent" and the " largest area of remnant vegetation remaining in the Liverpool Plains".Kibble, Gilligan and West (2012) NSW Planning Assessment Commission Review Report: Maules Creek Coal Project p11 Leard state forest is home to 396 native species of plants and animals, 34 threatened species and numerous endangered ecological communities.
As of 2015 "Maules Creek [was] the biggest coal mine under construction and one of the few tier-one, undeveloped coal deposits in Australia."
The area expected to be impacted by the mine in its lifetime is approximately 2,177 ha. This consists of 1655 ha of forest and woodland and a further 413 ha of native grassland and 99 ha of exotic grassland.Precedent Open cut coal mining requires significant water usage to mediate toxic dust and fine particles produced by their operation. Approximately 250 liters of freshwater are required for every single ton of coal extracted and produced. As the CSIRO further elaborates, waters involvement in coal mining includes:
transport of ore and waste in slurries and suspension separation of minerals through chemical processes physical separation of material such as in centrifugal separation cooling systems around power generation suppression of dust, both during mineral processing and around conveyors and roads washing equipment dewatering of mines
Whitehaven Coal specifically notes its use of water at Maules Creek site as:
"On site, water is used to suppress dust, to wash the coal in the Coal Handling and Processing Plant (CHPP) and across other miscellaneous areas. Some water is lost through evaporation."
As Whitehaven Coal's water management statement notes:
"The Maules Creek mine’s primary external water source is a 3000ML High Security water licence from the Namoi River, which flows during high rainfall events and from Keepit Dam periodic releases."
More specifically related to the incident:
"Other site water sources include rainfall into the pit and licensed groundwater allocations."Incident and resultWhitehaven Coal was found complacent in two alleged breaches of section 60A(2) of the Water Management Act 2000 by extracting water unlicensed between 2016 and 2019. Grant Barnes, Chief Regulatory Officer at the Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR), stated that "the mine is alleged to have failed to divert clean water from major streams on the Maules Creek site" This was accomplished through the construction of sediment dam (7/MC10) along with the operation of its Western Clean Water Diversion program to its own holding tanks, instead of nearby Back Creek. Notions suggests that Whitehaven did not take an active role in managing water resources its site was endowed with, instead choosing to use its private position as a primary benefactor of this resource.