CSR Limited - Wittenoom Controversy

Wittenoom Controversy

Between 1948 and 1966, CSR operated mines at Wittenoom, Western Australia that produced 161 000 tons of crocidolite fibre. During this time, thousands of workers and their families, visitors, tourists, consultants and Government officials were exposed to potentially lethal levels of blue asbestos almost a thousand times higher than occupationally regulated at the time. Many of them would develop fatal diseases due to this, such as pleural mesothelioma and lung cancer.

Despite warnings from the Western Australia Health Department and other health authorities in the early 1960s, CSR continued to operate the mine until 1966. The first court victory for the Wittenoom victims was in 1988, when Klaus Rabenault won his case against Midalco, a subsidiary of CSR that ran the mines. The judge ruled that CSR acted with 'continuing, conscious and contumelious' disregard for its workers' safety and that Rabenault should be awarded $426,000 by way of compensation and $250,000 in punitive damages.

It is predicted that by 2020, almost a third of the people who passed through Wittenoom during the mines' operating years would be diagnosed with a fatal disease caused by their dangerous exposures to blue asbestos. This would be an estimated 2000 cases totaling costs of $500 million (AUS) in damages from CSR.

In the 1980s CSR was pursued by victims of asbestosis caused by the operation of its Midalco subsidiary in Western Australia. By 1988, 258 damage-related suits had been taken against CSR, though only a handful of cases had been heard in the courts. In May that year a Victorian court made an award of A$680,000 against Midalco to a former worker, after he contracted the fatal lung cancer, mesothelioma; and in August, lesser amounts were awarded to other workers, against CSR itself (22). Finally in 1989 and the following year, something approaching a fair settlement was made.

Meanwhile CSR and the State Government Insurance Commission of Western Australia were engaged in a dispute as to which of them was responsible for payment of the damages to the tortured workforce and their dependents, with CSR arguing that it was not responsible for liabilities sustained by its Midalco subsidiary. The two bodies finally reached agreement in early 1989 to share the costs of compensation (23). A$15 million would be paid out by each of them to cover damages for the seven-year period of operation of the Wittenoom mine, with an additional total of A$20 million payable to claimants who worked there before 1959 (23). By the end of that year, researchers at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical centre, and the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, in Perth had estimated that a further 692 workers would fall victim to mesothelioma with another 183 cases of lung cancer to be expected. They predicted another 432 successful claims would be made, in addition to the 356 already accepted (24).

At the beginning of 1990, 322 workers had been compensated (25). A few months later CSR made a partial re-entry into mining, when it bought up 48 quarries from the US ARC subsidiary of the British Hanson corporation. It also pulled out of a plasterboard joint venture with Redland Plasterboard (established in 1987) while retaining its Australian and New Zealand interests, through Monier PGH - a company with around half of the Australian roofing tile market (26).

The mining and milling of blue asbestos at Wittenoom is as of 2004 the greatest single industrial disaster in Australia's history.

The song Blue Sky Mine by Australian rock band Midnight Oil is about the disaster.