Wagin St John Ambulance Sub Centre Closes
Article Date: 16th July, 2009 | 321 Views | 0 Comment(s)
WAGIN'S St John Ambulance sub centre has been closed amid concerns chemicals may have leached into the building and surrounding ground.
The land was previously used as an operations and storage centre for Western Power and included the storage of power poles that had been treated by chemicals.
Western Power spokesperson Marisa Chapman said the poles and any associated chemicals were removed when the land was sold by the company SECWA in 1986.
However, the Health Department has requested that Western Power conduct soil vapour sampling to confirm whether or not vapour is seeping into the building and at what level.
This is estimated to take about four months.
It is anticipated that huge amounts of soil will need to be removed from the site which will make the area surrounding the main sub-centre building uninhabitable.
The closure of the centre, located on the corner of Rifle and Stubbs Streets in Wagin, has left the volunteers seeking alternate premises for training and general business.
The ambulance vehicles are being stored at the Wagin Shire council depot in the meantime.
St John Ambulance, which owns the land, has been offered a lease back situation by Western Power to assist in any temporary or potentially permanent relocation of the sub-centre.
Ms Chapman said the organisation needed to establish who was responsible for the land before any action could be taken.
"SECWA (whose poles were on the land) later became Western Power and Alinta, and since has been split to form more separate groups," she said.
"When the organisation was split each one of the groups took responsibility for certain aspects of the original business.
"Finding out which group is responsible is a long process, and in the interim Western Power offered to assist St John Ambulance with relocation."
Western Power environmental operations manager John Morrell said the closure of the centre was a precautionary measure.
"At this stage we have not informed residents in the immediate area as the initial information we have suggests that the levels of any toxins are not high enough to be any threat to the residents," Mr Morrell said.
"The closure of the building used by St John Ambulance on the grounds was purely precautionary and not anything we told St Johns."
Ms Chapman said that once Western Power had found which group was to take responsibility, the public would be informed.
St John Ambulance regional manager Sally Singleton said Western Power had been mindful of the situation and had been extremely supportive of the organisation and understood how difficult it was for ambulance operations and services to continue in Wagin without a suitable venue.
"Western Power has leased the site back from us, in order to repair the site," Ms Singleton said.
"We need to find alternative premises for a minimum of 12 months while testing and subsequent remediation of the site is carried out by Western Power," she said.
"The clean up exercise is not only time consuming but also costly and with government budgets the way they are at the moment it is not anticipated that this will happen immediately."
For the moment it appears to be a waiting game all round and no-one appears to have the answers to the immediate or the long term situation.
