A Santos employee has sought protection from federal parliament to accuse the Australian oil and gas company of covering up the severity of an oil spill that killed dolphins off the northern Western Australian coast.
A statement by an anonymous whistleblower, tabled in federal parliament by the independent senator David Pocock, described witnessing a 25,000L spill of condensate – a light form of oil – near the Lowendal Islands in March last year.
The statement said dead dolphins, including a pup, were found “floating in dense sections of the oil spill” caused by a tear in a subsea hose that was connected to an oil tanker being loaded from Santos’ Varanus Island gas plant. Pocock also tabled photos showing oil in the water and dolphins floating belly-up in the sea with a tanker in the background.
The whistleblower, who said sea snakes “writhed in agony” during the spill, also said they were shocked a month later to read a public statement by Santos in WAtoday saying the spill had caused only “negligible” harm to the environment. The company later denied it was responsible for the dolphins’ death.
The whistleblower said the company’s environmental assessors did not arrive on the island until a week after the incident and could not have known the real scale of the impact.
“The tragedy of dolphin carcasses amid a kilometre-wide oil slick should be the story,” they said. “But it’s not. The story is Santos’s subsequent cover-up and total disregard for the values they say they...
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