Return to Articles page »
"No risk to Employees' Health"
Terra Nova, August 1992
By Philippa Stevenson
Reg Ryder pulled up his trouser leg to show the red welts on his shin and foot.
"They come up in a hard lump, go red, get rough and weep," he said.
Across the room Reg's former workmate Mike Harman bared an arm covered in scabs.
"It seems to itch until you make it bleed, then it stops. They take a long time to get better," said Harman.
Ryder, aged 54, has had three heart attacks, is a chronic diabetic and in line for a hip replacement. Harman, aged 43, has partial sight and a painful back complaint which limits his work options.
They would willingly put up with all the discomfort of their other health problems if they could just get rid of the itchy rash which drives them and their families "bonkers".
"I drive my wife mad. I get up in the night and go hell for leather across my back with a T shirt," Harman said.
"I've got rashes breaking out on me all the time," Ryder said. "I can't have my hip operation because if the rash got in the wound it wouldn't heal."
They also both describe a burning sensation when their eyes water. "It's like I've got acid in the eyes," said Ryder.
Until they met for an interview with Terra Nova in late June they didn't know they shared the highly irritating skin condition or the burning sensation in their eyes. They hadn't seen each other for five years, not since the day in 1987 when they drove for the last time through the gates of the Forest Service Waipa timber mill, 5km from Rotorua.
Before their departure they put the last charge (stack of timber) through the mill's Rueping treatment plant - a plant which used high pressure to infuse timber with preservative chemicals mixed in oil. By the time they walked away as redundant workers, between them the pair had clocked up 27 years as Rueping treatment plant operators. They had also worked on other treatment processes including the Boliden plant which used copper chrome arsenate.
But they worked mostly on the Rueping plant, the biggest of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and knew it inside out. They knew its valves, its tanks, its pumps, it pipes, its cylinders, dials - everything about it. They knew how dangerous it could be. It operated with steam pressure and huge quantities of oil heated to extremely high temperatures.
"The last time it blew it took them seven days to put it out," Harman said.
"For three and a half days it burned continuously, you could see the smoke for miles," said Ryder.
And one night Ryder probably saved Harman's sight, risking his own health to drag Harman from the treatment cylinder awash with the oil mix and reeking with chemical fumes after a busted pipe had squirted the hot mixture into Harman's eyes.
What Ryder and Harman never understood was the danger presented by what they called penta - the antisapstain chemical pentachlorophenol or PCP - which they daily tipped from drums into the hot oil. Ironically, Harman chose to work in the Rueping plant after he developed dermatitis from working with glues in the lamination department.
Each shift in the plant they would manhandle between four and five 200 litre (44 gallon) drums each containing 218kg of PCP and tip it into 18,000 litres of oil heated to 76degC. The mix would then be heated to 93degC. When they did two shifts in a day they would handle the PCP drums twice in 16 hours.
Harman still has a 90 page manual written in 1964 on how to run the Rueping plant. It mentions the risks of using PCP well into the complicated instructions, on page 69. It begins "PCP is a highly irritant substance which has in certain circumstances been toxic to humans. However, with the proper precautions it may be handled with perfect safety."
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has estimated that human skin absorbs 50 per cent of the amount of PCP it is exposed to from oil-based formulations, and 1 per cent from water-based formulations. University of Washington researchers, however, have put the absorption figures higher, at 62 per cent of the PCP in oil and 16 per cent of the PCP in water.
PCP can kill with sufficient exposure and has done so many times. Symptoms of exposure to PCP may include stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, rapid breathing, fever, sweating and weakness and the body temperature may rise to high levels. There is also a severe skin condition, chloracne, like acne in appearance but often more widespread and disfiguring. It can be very slow to heal.
The industrial grade PCP used in New Zealand over 40 years will have been moderately to heavily contaminated with other toxins, principally dioxins. Dioxins can be stored in the human body in fatty tissue. The compounds can be released from the fatty tissue when the body is stressed or fat is lost through weight loss.
Ryder and Harman knew nothing about such research findings. They had their suspicions over the years about working with PCP the way they did but never had them confirmed by anyone.
The first real notion came in May this year when a newspaper story announced to them in their Rotorua homes that Forestry Corporation of New Zealand, the successor to their employer, the Forest Service, had undertaken to spend $3 million to clean up their old work place, the Waipa Mill, which the company said had "significant levels of PCP contamination ... in soil and groundwater at the Waipa site and in the nearby Waipa Stream."
Quoting a Government task group which had recently completed a study of Waipa, Forest Corp said that "the report concluded that there was no risk to employees' health under normal working conditions."
The statement made no mention of past employees, despite former workers being the only ones to handle PCP which the timber industry stopped using in 1988. Ryder and Harman have never been contacted by the company or members of the task group, although they worked at the heart of the most polluting and contaminated part of the site. They could also have offered information on the mill as well as the location of disposal sites of contaminated waste.
Reg Ryder and Mike Harman still live in Rotorua and were not difficult to locate. When Terra Nova asked Dennis Galvin, Wood Industries Union branch secretary in Rotorua, to help contact some former Waipa workers Ryder and Harman came immediately to mind. Galvin worked at Waipa between 1978 and 1981 as a fitter at the same time as Ryder, Harman and a number of others, also still in Rotorua.
Galvin also knew the Rueping plant well, having frequently been called in to work on it. He said it was an area that management staff seldom visited. "It used to be a great place to go to get away from the boss because they never went down there."
Ryder and Harman can describe vividly their normal working conditions in a building at the heart of the Waipa Mill site which still stands today.
They pulled on overalls over the clothes they wore from home, wore gloves and a small cardboard mask which covered mouth and nose. They couldn't wear goggles because they steamed up and made it impossible to see what they were doing. The air was full of PCP dust and hot smelly fumes.
Ryder: "You had two tanks, one which you dropped your mix (PCP) into and that was pumped back into a top tank which was fed by gravity back in. So it circulated around and while it was circulating you had all those hot fumes and sometimes the fan used to break down; so you were working in amongst all that."
Harman: "I had a rubber respirator but in the summer time I couldn't wear it because you used to drown in your own perspiration."
The smell in the plant was unpleasantly strong and breathing in the hot air burned the lungs, they said. Galvin described how he was called in once to fix the tram lines in the cylinder, was overcome with the fumes and vomited.
When the plant was busy and operating 24 hours-a-day, seven days-a-week "it was nothing for us to work 16 hours straight," said Harman. "Two shifts, two mixes."
Ryder: "Sometimes we had to run two (treatment) plants together, until we had that many spills of solution. That went down the drain to Whaka (Whakarewarewa village and tourist attraction). The penny divers (at Whaka) kicked up."
Harman: "We had a Mickey Mouse alarm system that was on the mixing tank for PCP and oil. We used to pour these drums (of PCP) in. Now if you got carried away or slipped or the drum slipped, there wasn't anything to hold on to and at night there was poor lighting, then the whole drum could slip into the funnel. There was no way you could retrieve that drum out of that funnel.
"The only way you could unjam that pipe was to keep pumping and hoping like hell. The next thing you would know you'd have a fountain of water, and it didn't just go five or six feet, it went twenty or thirty feet into the air. It would spray everything. All over the dirt roadway and down into the creek. All over you, invariably we would get soaked with it trying to clear the blockage. And all the time you're working in chemical and fumes."
Ryder: "They used to fix up the spillage on the roadway by dumping a load of metal or sawdust over it and that was it."
They say they were told little about the chemicals with which they were working. As certificated operators, qualified under the New Zealand Wood Preservation Association and later the Timber Preservation Authority, Ryder and Harman were responsible for training other people.
Ryder: "We knew there was a degree of toxicity but not the extent of it. How dangerous it was wasn't really told to us. There were the poison signs on the drums, skull and cross bones, but all we were told is to be careful how we handled it."
Harman: "We were told nothing. Nobody ever once warned us that this stuff could have a detrimental effect on our health. It wasn't until I started getting this hot flush on the skin and I thought: God, there's got to be something wrong with this stuff. Actually, what made me get really stroppy about it all was when I had to wear glasses after getting it in my eyes. But I was just brushed aside."
The night Harman got the hot oil/PCP mix in his eyes Ryder tried to flush it out but was defeated by Harman's struggles. "Every time I tried to open his eyes he would scream and pull away. I couldn't handle that so I got him out of the cylinder and went and called the ambulance."
Ryder said he was reprimanded by management for not doing more for Harman before he called the ambulance. Harman believes his mate did all he could for him in the circumstances. "They worked for three hours on me in the hospital. They had to numb my whole face before they could work on me," he said.
Harman had not done anything unusual the night of the accident. Operators entered the treatment cylinder to attach a rope used to haul out the railway car on which lay the treated poles, logs or timber. The cylinder always had sludge in the bottom over which they crawled. At night they found their way with a torch.
Harman's eyes were permanently scarred when the pipe broke, and his sight reduced. He inquired about compensation but was told he was lucky he hadn't lost his job over the incident because he should have been wearing safety goggles.
"I told them you can't wear safety goggles because you can't see. I had on a hat pulled down, a face mask and a scarf."
Ryder described how for nine months during his time at Waipa he coughed up blood and passed it in his faeces but he says no connection was ever made with the nature of his work, by him, the company doctor or his own GP.
Harman says in 1991 he had medical examinations because he, too, was coughing and passing blood. No questions were asked about his work history and he didn't think to mention it.
"They asked me what I was doing now and I said teaching kids to abseil and so on." (Harman is now an outdoor education instructor).
They feel their lifestyle has been pretty clean outside work. They worked hard over long hours "because money was everything in those days," said Harman. Alcohol consumption was not high. "We never got drunk. We were into our cars, played darts, pool. We were a pretty close-knit bunch. We smoked but we've all given up now except one joker."
Staff had to fight for better conditions on the site, said the men. Because no smoko room was provided, for some time they ate lunch in the Rueping plant over a drainage pit which held waste oil. They eventually converted a room themselves for their smoko. It had been previously used for mixing chemicals. After Harman saw a Kawerau mill chemical shower he battled for the same thing for Waipa. There was a tussle, too, over overalls until enough were provided to enable workers to change them regularly.
In the early days of Ryder's working life at Waipa during the 1960s, waste from the Rueping plant went into a hole in the ground. The oil mix in the hole was periodically burnt off. It regularly overflowed as rain and water runoff from the road flowed into it and the overflow would run in to the nearby stream. Hay bales, sawdust and bark were at various times kept on the site to be spread about in an attempt to stop the oil flowing into the stream.
Later disposal of the waste from the Rueping plant was done whenever a receiving tank was full and during an annual clean up. That involved the men climbing into tanks which had held chemicals and oil to hose them out.
The waste was pumped out but the pump could never get all of it which meant the last of the sludge had to be shovelled away by the men who would climb into the tank to do it. Occasionally Ryder and Harman would accompany the tanker to the dumping site. It went to various places - all of which they believe they could find today - near Murupara, Ngongotaha and on farms around Rotorua. The disposal operator, who still lives in Rotorua, would also be able to pinpoint the disposal sites of the contaminated waste, the men say.
Dennis Galvin says the Waipa Mill, a major employer for Rotorua over its 53 year history and at different times the biggest employer not only in the town but the entire Bay of Plenty, always had a very stable workforce because pay was good. At one time 1400 people worked for the company.
"There used to be a big sign outside the gate which read, 'this mill supports between 800 and 1000 families per week'. That used to be their catch cry."
For two former employees, Ryder and Harman, it would be a relief just to be able to talk to someone about their health problems. They say they don't know whether they are caused by exposure to chemicals but they would sure like to find some who would listen to them at last.
As they read the information provided by Forest Corp in its May announcement they see for the first time in their lives the symptoms attributed to exposure to PCP, many of which are thought to disappear when exposure ceases. Harman recalls the "crashing headaches" he used to get during his working days. Ryder says he had migraines. They found the best way to stop their faces burning after a shift was to wash in kerosene. They remember how they used to cough constantly. Ryder says he had pleurisy several times while he was at the mill but since leaving has had few colds. He looks at the information on dioxins and wonders if his rash has got worse because he has been trying to lose weight, whether the effort could be releasing dioxins into his system.
They don't know what it all means but they know nobody else does either. Nobody has asked them. They are puzzled that no one is checking with the people who worked on the site with the chemicals at the time the contamination occurred.
"Someone checked the fish but they never came to us," said Ryder.
Top
Return to Articles page »
Unless otherwise explicitly stated, all material on this website is copyright © Philippa Stevenson.
