Inside Hazelwood: An ode to the workers

Updated

Its rhythms have shaped their lives for decades. Those who labour beside them have become family. In Victoria's Latrobe Valley, hundreds of workers prepare to farewell the place that's been their lifeblood.

Coal dust will seep into your skin, stick in your pores.

After a stretch of 12-hour days marinating in the stuff, you blow your nose and it's like blowing briquettes.

It's one of those things you stop registering once you've worked here for enough decades — a detail you'll notice more by its absence, you suspect. Like when the chimneys stop smoking and eventually vanish altogether from the landscape.

For the uninitiated, Hazelwood contains a few surprises.

One is how little manpower it takes to run the place.

The imagination conjures a pit swarming with workers.

The reality feels almost deserted by comparison. In full production mode, there are 70 people in the entire mine on a weekday, 30 on a weekend and 17 at night.

The power station is even more sparsely populated: 28 souls can operate the hulking plant.

Mining can be a transient industry.

Hazelwood is different. The average tenure of a worker here is 25 years. The average age, 52.

Since the mine opened in the 50s, followed by the plant in the 60s, multiple generations of families — sometimes grandfather, father and son — have worked at Hazelwood and lived in the local community.

They've been drawn and held by the money (with overtime, a job in the mine can see you make $200,000 a year), the proximity of the Latrobe Valley to both Melbourne and to beaches, and the lifestyle made possible by long shifts followed by five days off in a row.

"It's been a good cow," says 55-year-old fitter and turner Tom Whitelaw, working on a crossword puzzle in a brew [break] room.

He's been at Hazelwood since he was a 20-year-old. He left, and then returned.

"It's allowed me to stay at home with the kids rather than travelling for work."

Of the closure he says: "It's inconvenient. Life will go on."

Morale has been up and down. The mood swings from morose to philosophical with a solid dose of gallows humour.

The death of Hazelwood means one thing to an older guy nearing retirement and another to a young bloke raising a family. But all recognise the threat to the region with the loss of an industry.

Some fear they'll have to uproot from the Latrobe Valley in search of a new job — possibly a whole new line of work.

Of the 450-strong Engie workforce, 135 will stay on for the first year of the decommissioning, along with 100–130 contractors.

The extra time, if it stretches to two or three years, might be enough to see some workers to retirement. For others, it's a temporary reprieve — they'll be in the same boat as everyone else soon enough.

Danny Boothman started down the mine as a boiler operator but now spends his days in an air-conditioned control room inside the power plant.

At 54, he's planning to do a sound engineering course at RMIT. "It's an excuse to make a change," he says.

The singer-songwriter has channelled 29 years of 12 hour shifts into a moving goodbye simply called The Hazelwood Song.

In the film clip he stands in the power station carpark in fluorescent work garb, out of focus and strumming his guitar.

"…Let's all have a drink to Hazelwood, lift your glasses high. Let's all have a drink to Hazelwood, it's sad to watch the old girl die…"

Within the giant hall that houses the eight turbines and measures a cavernous 400 metres from end to end, the heat can be intense. When temperatures are in the thirties outside it can hit 60-plus degrees inside.

Navigating the levels can feel like entering a game of Donkey Kong. Up this ladder, down these steps, step in this lift, duck your head here.

It's no place for a fear of heights or tight spaces. An industrial rabbit warren with a colour palette of pastel greens, aquas and bright oranges, as though not a lick of paint has changed since construction in the 60s.

A living museum is how one worker describes it.

Already larger-than-life cobwebs drape from the fluorescent overhead lights like something out of a haunted house, almost too dramatic to be real.

Workers hang like spiders themselves off the chimneys that soar 137 metres above the Latrobe Valley, busy patching weakened sections of concrete — an unexpected sight in the plant's dying days.

Though they'll stop emitting gases very soon, the chimneys might not be demolished for years and need to be kept safe in the meantime.

Hazelwood is a hungry beast. Ravenous.

Operating at full throttle, the station consumes 55,000 tonnes of coal each 24 hours. In full production, the mine digs 18 million tonnes a year to feed the plant, producing a quarter of Victoria's energy requirements.

On the mine floor, the dredger looks ancient and ferocious at once — like something out of Mad Max.

Rigged together with steel cables, the behemoth, deemed a "she" by the miners, dwarfs the human form as it chomps its way relentlessly through the 100-metre thick seam of solid coal, just as it has for more than 50 years.

"This resource, there's nothing cheaper in the world," says mine production manager Rob Dugan, who spouts Hazelwood facts and figures with impressive aplomb. It's not unlike the way a mother can chart the ins and outs of her child's life trajectory by heart.

The Hazelwood mine site measures 18 kilometres around the edge, he says.

It's set on 3,800 hectares, with an 11,000-hectare mine footprint and the surrounding land leased to farmers to run cattle or grow hay. 110 kilometres of road wend through the mine.

It's the dig ratio that makes Hazelwood so economical, Dugan explains.

The arrangement of the geology means you only have to remove a small amount of dirt to get to the coal. And there's a vast amount of it.

Figures citing hundreds of years worth of resource still in the ground get thrown around.

What will become of it now?

Dugan releases the steering wheel for a moment to dust his hands together. "Gone forever," he says, wistfully. "We'll fill it with water."

That's the sentiment from those who work in coal: what a waste.

Operating until 2025 at full noise had been the vision for Hazelwood. In Germany, says Dugan, who went there to see for himself, they plan their shutdowns 10 to 20 years out. And then they give the land back to the community as a recreational resource.

There, Dugan saw an ex-mine site with wineries and caravan parks built on the slopes. He envisions down the track a Lake Hazelwood. It'll hold 1.2 times as much water as Sydney Harbour.

But it wasn't supposed to happen like this. It feels heartless after all the years poured in.

Like many of his colleagues, 53-year-old Mark Peruzzi is farewelling his workplace of three decades — a loyalty almost unheard of in today's job market.

"We thought it was going to be a phased shutdown. If you got told it was going to shut down by 2020, that would have softened the blow.

"I think they're making a big mistake. I think politicians have too much say over people's lives."

In the turbine hall, a lone pair of workers are already beginning to take Hazelwood apart, bolt by bolt, salvaging materials. Forensic, yet immutably sad.

Another member of the decommissioning crew traces a torch beam across a wall, following a pipe to its source in preparation for the great dismantling.

At least it's her loved ones who'll put the old girl down.

"Bong on Aussie bong on," reads graffiti in one nook, reminiscent of something you might see etched on the back of a school bus shelter. A hint of the culture that comes with an almost all-male workplace?

Hazelwood management says it's "[slang] from a bygone era" as drug and alcohol testing has been in place for years.

There are 30 female Engie employees but no women in operational roles in the mine, and only two in the power station: one a shift manager and the other an assistant unit controller.

"Who says I never lift a finger?" reads a worker's mug, adorned with an image of a cheery four-fingered salute as it's filled with coffee for one of the last times.

Irreverence is everywhere. And why not, at this point?

Coal dust coats the floor, collecting the imprints of so many boots.

An errant puff of steam escapes from a rusted grate in the floor, diffuses into nothingness.

In the cockpit of a dredger, one hand nudges faithfully around a clock face covered with grime. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Topics: unions, government-and-politics, unemployment, community-and-society, morwell-3840, moe-3825, vic

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