Bird watchers have witnessed dramatic decreases in numbers of birds especially on the Fergus Estuary mudflats, which is an internationally protected bird area. Perhaps most worrying and significant of all were the eight saline cattle deaths reported in July 1996. Watered from a supposedly freshwater ditch between the Fergus Estuary and farmland just a few hundred yards down from the plant, they died of acute salt poisoning. In samples taken by the EPA from the farm's water barrels and the ditch, the salt content was over ten times of that present in the adjacent p art of the estuary, the other side of the embankment. Despite bromoform readings hugely in excess of a ny other compound, no test for the specific salt was carried out.
Bromoform is the bromine equivalent of the more famil iar chloroform.
Remember the brownish gas witnessed before. The EPA would not need Sherlock Holmes on the case to work out probable cause in this instance. In the amended licence the company is now going to be able to emit up to five hundred thousand litres of untreated scrubber effluent from the incinerator into the estuary on a daily basis, with no limits on dioxins or organohalogens, two of the most toxic groups of compounds known. The ash from the incinerator is to be landfilled in a non-toxic dump on site without toxicity testing. It will contain dioxins and organohalogens.