If you live in Hobart, especially in the southern reaches of the Derwent River, you woke up one morning to find a 107-metre-long, 21,000-tonne, piece of industrial plant in your aquatic ‘back yard’.

The drilling rig Ocean Monarch has been looking for gas off East Gippsland and needs a safe place with cheap mooring fees, where it can tie up. TasPorts have sent them to an area between Droughty Pt and South Arm on the eastern shore of the river. It will be moored in Hobart for three months.

The local reaction was mixed, many people were fascinated by the awesome size of the technology and others aghast at the ugliness of this blight on their vista. The Greens complained that it was moored too close to the threatened spotted handfish colonies of Ralph’s Bay. I assume it isn’t much of a threat, and that is rather the problem, we have to assume everything.

Only after the protest, EPA director Wes Ford said the rig went through strict Commonwealth regulatory checks before arriving in Bass Strait. “I’ve been advised by the state’s threatened species experts that the spotted handfish population is greater than 1.5 kilometres from the mooring site, so the rig itself won’t have any direct impact on the handfish,” he said. “The environmental management plan for the rig states there can’t be any environmental discharge, and all the works on the rig are occurring above the water line.” However, that doesn’t mean much with a submersible vessel, they can be scraping anti-fouling off without getting into the water. I assume that also means there is no major disturbance of sediments on the bottom. But I have to assume that.

You can get a bit off the internet. The Ocean Monarch drilling rig is owned by Texas-based Diamond Offshore was parked off the Perth coast for about three months to “undergoing maintenance work”. I have a suspicion they are actually “between jobs” and are just looking for a cheap place to moor. The crew is kept from boredom with some scraping and painting, even less of a reason to be alarmed.

Two anchor handling tug supply vessels are also there. She has eight 15-tonne anchors that hold the 105m wide deep-water platform in place. These each have up to 3000 metres of chain. That suggests she has been pumped up to raise her off the bottom and she is moored. It also means that where they drop those massive anchors is the area of the seabed that counts as that is the area getting scoured. I very much doubt that is near handfish, but as we haven’t surveyed out port mooring areas, who knows.

Just in case that doesn’t satisfy you and you were thinking of chaining yourself to the rig, an exclusion zone of 500 metres around the Ocean Monarch will be in place for the duration of its stay. Great, even if you like the idea you can’t really even get a decent photo. Big zone for an apparently small impact.

We also don’t seem to swap information and respond across agencies to map and send out alerts for activities that might create an issue for endangered species. When you want a permit to put a building on land, the Tas Government has overlays showing where threatened vegetation communities, or heritage sites are. There is a legislated referral process to the relevant assessment agency and legislation to tell you in advance what is not allowed in that location, but that doesn’t happen in the water.

I suspect almost no-one at TasPorts has the faintest idea as to where the handfish colonies are, or what their vulnerabilities are. I wonder what effort went in to site selection, and I bet navigation and views were well ahead of any other concerns. I strongly suspect that if it had been identified as a threat to handfish, still nothing concrete would have been done. The Federal Minister would have signed off the extra paperwork as a formality, with less review time than he spent on the lunch menu at the Parliamentary cafeteria. He seems to have done this for a recent marine farming permit for Norfolk Bay.

In the end result everyone is probably right, it sounds like not much of an impact, but is that good enough anymore? Shouldn’t we be trying to improve our processes of environmental protection and our access to information. I’m getting antsy because this is the second development in a row that we have had forced on us at the last minute, that could have damaged the habitat of a threatened species, with few details placed in the public domain. I acknowledge that it is hard to get people to notice something until they see it, or to quickly whip up an information package when you’re doing permits on the run, but I also cynically wonder if the last minute bit is done so that if you say, “OK, tell me more”, they can bellow that you are holding up development. Let’s think of a better way.

Oh, and the newspapers got excited about the drilling platform previously featuring in the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster “Armageddon” (although its been totally rebuilt since then). OK, and they think I deal in nerdy trivialities.