Oil spill royal commission call
The discovery of an oil-like substance coating mangroves in the Northern Territory, less than 100km from the WA border, has intensified calls for the inquiry into the West Atlas oil rig disaster to have the powers of a royal commission.
Members of the remote Wadeye community, 400km south-west of Darwin, reported finding a black oil-like substance spread along hundreds of metres of beach and mangroves off Bonaparte Gulf yesterday morning.
The discovery raised fears that oil drifting in the Timor Sea from the 10-week-long West Atlas oil leak had made it to the mainland. The Northern Territory Government is testing samples of the substance to establish whether it has the same chemical footprint as oil from the West Atlas spill.
A spokesman for the NT Government said a flyover of the area by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority did not detect any evidence of the substance in surrounding waters.
"All indications are that the material is localised to specific coastal areas near Wadeye," the spokesman said.
Fishermen and villagers in West Timor have been complaining for weeks that oil from the spill has killed fish, contaminated seaweed farms and made villagers sick.
The Australian Embassy in Jakarta has denied that Indonesian waters have been contaminated.
Conservationists called yesterday for a full and independent inquiry into the West Atlas disaster as work on the clean-up continued.
The Federal Government has promised an independent inquiry into the disaster but has yet to release the terms of reference. Conservationists fear the inquiry could become a whitewash and have called for it to have the powers of a royal commission.
WWF-Australia urged the Government to call an inquiry similar in scale to the investigation into the British Piper Alpha oil rig fire in 1988, which killed 167 rig workers.
Greens Senator Rachel Siewert echoed the calls, saying there was no excuse to delay the inquiry.
"We believe there are massive holes in how the Government responded to this incident, and we believe they need to be looked at and rectified so that they never happen again," she said.
Yesterday, the company at the centre of the spill, PTTEP Australasia, said the wellhead remained stable following Tuesday's successful "well kill" operation.
"The well is under control and the fire on the West Atlas rig has been extinguished," the company said.
A team of specialists on the West Triton relief rig, stationed near the West Atlas rig, was preparing to reboard the stricken rig and the Montara wellhead platform.
Once aboard, the team would conduct a damage assessment of the wellhead before plugging the well permanently.
PTTEP chief financial officer Jose Martins said he was confident the well, which was still in the development stage when the leak began, would go into production next year.
PTTEP's parent company revealed to the Thai Stock Exchange it was processing an insurance claim for the spill and clean-up effort. Last week, it revealed the incident had cost the company more than $170 million, including a $5.3 million clean-up bill from the Federal Government.
