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Serious safety incidents revealed in leaked images from the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme show an out-of-control excavator and a dump truck hanging off a cliff, compounding the problems plaguing a project that faces further multibillion-dollar cost blowouts and years of delays.
The troubled project, which has blown out from $2 billion to $12 billion, will feature at a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday, when executives from the federal government-owned corporation Snowy Hydro will be grilled about costs and the latest in a growing list of on-site incidents.
Among the most serious, a leaked video shows an excavator’s boom striking a worker to the ground as it swung around after the driver’s harness was caught in the machine’s controls while he hopped out of the cab.
Three workers were near the excavator as its boom and bucket swung, while a fourth rushed from further away to help, seconds after the incident occurred at the bottom of a deep shaft.
Despite the injured worker being hospitalised, the incident on Australia Day was initially classified as a near miss. The injured worker remains off work four months after the incident.
“It could have been catastrophic. If that bucket had hit the guy on the head, he could have been dead,” said a project source who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak.
In another incident, a dump truck was left teetering over the edge of a cliff in January last year after a park brake failure. Known as a “moxy”, the truck rolled down a well-used metal road at one of the project’s sites called Lobs Hole, narrowly avoiding tumbling more than 30 metres over the cliff into a creek.
A second project source – a worker with knowledge of the incident who spoke on condition of anonymity – said an employee who had only recently started on the project forgot to leave the truck’s handbrake on. “It’s just luck that there wasn’t a person in or around the truck at the time,” they said.
Last month, a crane incorrectly lifted a cherry picker, leaving it on its side. Other incidents have involved sewerage spills and a prime mover hauling large equipment jack-knifing and blocking a road for two days.
A third source with knowledge of safety management on Snowy 2.0 said the road blockage illustrated how costs were blowing out on the project.
“The majority of the blue-collar workforce [was] stood down in camp for two days over Saturday and Sunday, for which they would have got full pay,” they said. “Who covers the wages for that? That’s obviously got to be the taxpayer.”
Videos of water gushing through a tunnel and cavern have previously revealed the obstacles the multibillion-dollar project is encountering beneath the Kosciuszko National Park, and away from the public’s eye.
One of the sources said the high-pressure torrent of water that rushed through the headrace tunnel last month should not have been a surprise given contractors pressed ahead with drilling in an area they were advised was likely to tap into significant volumes of groundwater.
“In hydro projects all around the world there are water inflows – that’s not the abnormal bit. More abnormal is they weren’t prepared for it,” they said.
Professionals Australia, which represents engineers, supervisors and other technical staff on the project, has warned Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes in a letter that safety concerns are frequently dismissed or downplayed, and some incidents misclassified.
The union’s NSW director, Justine McCarthy, said a combination of excessive hours and a broken reporting culture was creating unacceptable safety risks. “That is a dangerous combination on any worksite. On a project of this scale, it is a serious warning sign,” she said.
Snowy Hydro said it expected the highest standards of safety to be maintained, and the incidents outlined had been fully investigated by the principal contractor in consultation with the relevant regulators.
The corporation said a line-by-line assessment of costs was ongoing and would be subject to “multiple layers of scrutiny, including review by independent construction cost experts”.
NSW’s workplace safety regulator, SafeWork, confirmed it was notified and responded to incidents on January 26 this year, where a worker was injured during an excavation, and on January 10 last year involving a vehicle.
“Inspectors commenced inquiries and issued a number of regulatory notices, including improvement notices, in relation to the excavation incident. These notices have been complied with,” it said.
Italian company Webuild, which is leading construction of the project with two of its subsidiaries, was approached for comment.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull commissioned Snowy 2.0 in 2017, declaring a completion deadline of 2021. His initial price tag of $2 billion, announced before a feasibility study was complete, climbed to $6 billion when the report was completed.
The official price tag was changed to $12 billion in 2023, and the deadline extended to 2028. Then in October last year, Snowy asked Webuild and its subsidiaries to undertake another cost assessment, leaving many observers to expect another blowout.
The workers who spoke to this masthead are critical of the safety culture.
They said it was common knowledge among the workforce that major cost increases and years of delay to the 2028 deadline were inevitable. “It’s fairly well known now that it won’t be done until the decade has a three in front of it – in the 2030s,” one said.
One argued that despite the pressure from government on Snowy Hydro to meet the 2028 construction deadline, Webuild was incentivised to extend the timeline to boost its earnings from the project.
A spokesperson for Snowy Hydro rejected this argument and said its deal with Webuild was an incentivised target-cost contract, adding that such arrangements typically included financial penalties if the contractor exceeds it budget.
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