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It was the “needle in a haystack” search through WA’s outback that captivated the nation – and the world.
And, years after a tiny radioactive capsule of caesium-137 bounced off the back of a truck en route from Newman to Perth, interest in the uniquely West Australian story remains high.
The search for the missing radioactive capsule in WA in 2023.Credit: DFES
Darryl Ray discovered that this week, when he was set to take to the stage at the AFAC25 conference at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre.
The Pilbara superintendent for WA’s Department of Fire and Emergency Services was giving a speech on the search for the capsule in January 2023, which he spearheaded at the time.
“The topic was popular back then, and it’s just as popular and as interesting for others now,” Ray said.
“The room was quite full, it was standing room only, and they had to close the doors to stop people coming in. The interest was that high.”
The overarching story has been told plenty of times already: a truck travelling from Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri mine near Newman was carrying a specialised mining gauge to Perth.
However, days after the truck reached its destination in mid-late January, it was discovered the gauge had partially disassembled and the 8 millimetre by 6 millimetre radioactive capsule had made its way out of the container.
That meant it was lying somewhere on the side of more than 1400 kilometres of road, stretching from the Perth metropolitan area up to the remote Pilbara.
It led to one of the more bizarre HAZMAT warnings DFES has issued in its time, as well as a massive search, with persistent fears the capsule – which was smaller than a 10c coin – may have been picked up by accident, in the tread of a car tyre, for example.
The capsule was eventually found about 74 kilometres south of Newman, with cutting-edge technology and a team from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation playing a crucial role in the discovery.
Darryl Ray, left, during the search for the tiny capsule. Credit: DFES
Ray was speaking at Australasia’s biggest emergency management event this week to detail the strategies and challenges in the hunt for the capsule, as well as the lessons other countries could take from the ultimately successful ordeal.
Speaking to this masthead on the sidelines of the event, he said one of the biggest challenges was blocking out the “noise” to focus on the task at hand.
“There was constant distractions over, ‘this thing is not supposed to fall apart’, ‘this thing’s not supposed to fall off the back of a truck’, as you can imagine,” he said.
“I was the on-call incident controller for any major incident on that day when the job came through, so you kind of prepare yourself for that, and our normal command, control and co-ordination models just fit into any incident type.”
It was those models which allowed the team to keep a cool head, even while the headlines started to flow through, and the news even hit the late-night talk shows in the US.
“The biggest difference between this being a HAZMAT and a normal HAZMAT was we didn’t know where the product was,” Ray said.
“Normally in a HAZMAT we would get told there’s a spill or something’s leaking, or something like that, at an address, and we would arrive at the address and then put in our processes this place.
“This time, we just didn’t know the address, so it had the added complexities of having a search.
The tiny radioactive capsule when it was discovered in 2023.Credit: WA Radiological Council
“And there was a lot of external complexities that were distracting at times, with the media, with ministers and Parliament and pressure from the public and doubt over even if it did happen at all, and how could this have happened?
“But one of the key lessons is actually just focus on the task, keep it simple and put the white noise aside.”
There has naturally been a lot of interest from other countries’ emergency services on how DFES tracked the capsule down so quickly – it was recovered on February 1, 2023, after being reported missing on January 25, having likely fallen off the truck about a week earlier – as well as how the organisation managed the vast distances involved.
Ray said European countries especially had been interested in the processes the team put in place, and what could be taken away from the search.
“I mean, you’re going to cross four or five different countries by the time they travel 1400 kilometers in parts of Europe,” he said.
“The sharings that we that we had with them was quite a simple sort of process, believe it or not, of just our normal structures that you would have an incident in; having the right people with the right equipment, and then right know-how in the right roles is, was a key thing to it as well.”
In the aftermath, Rio Tinto’s then-iron ore chief executive Simon Trott apologised and offered to cover the costs of the search, while the WA Radiological Council led an investigation which concluded with no charges laid or fines issued. However, the type of gauge at the centre of the debacle was soon banned from use in WA.
Ray said in all his retellings of the story, there was always one question that came his way – and it wasn’t one he could answer.
“A lot of people wanted to know, you know, how it fell off the truck,” he said.
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“You know, quite frankly, as the incident controller of the search, that that didn’t matter.”
However, a presentation to the Australasian Radiation Protection Society conference in June 2023 from Rio Tinto’s chief advisor of radiological governance did shine some light on the cause of the search.
Frank Harris reported vibration during the journey had loosed bolts on the gauge, which led to them coming undone.
“The gauge basically shook itself into its component pieces in the overpack,” he reported.
Harris described the incident as “extremely unusual”, and the loss during transport as “even more uncommon”.
“Vibration was a major contributor to the failure of the gauge and allowed the source capsule to escape from the overpack during transport,” he reported.
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