A PROTESTER who went up a pole in the Pilliga for 17 hours yesterday turned the blowtorch on environmental concerns over coal-seam gas exploration on agricultural land.

The protestor, Warrick Jordan, spent nearly a day dangling from a 20-metre drilling rig, 30 kilometres south of Narrabri, but was arrested by police at 4.30pm and was being interviewed last night.

Mr Jordan, from the Rising Tide Group, climbed up onto the rig about midnight yesterday and was claiming it was a first for NSW.

The 20 or so protesters brought the coal-seam gas drilling pilot site to a standstill for the day.

Northern Inland Council for the Environment’s Carmel Flint was leaving the protest site about 5pm yesterday to pick up Mr Jordan once he was released by the police.

Coonabarabran resident and retired science teacher Jane Judd was one of 12 or so people from the town who were trying to highlight coal-seam gas drilling as the “thin edge of the wedge” in creating a situation of risk for landholders, supporters of the environment and the wider community.

Ms Judd, a spokeswoman for the Friends of the Pilliga, said protesters were not from Coonabarabran, but were from Newcastle and Sydney.

“This is not an action we undertake lightly,” she said.

“Eastern Star Gas are drilling through the Great Artesian Basin to coal seams underneath and extracting vast quantities of toxic water.

“This poses a risk to our most important aquifer, which our inland communities depend on.”

Mr Jordan said in a media statement that Eastern Star Gas’s (ESG) proposed system of wells would generate 600km of pipelines and would open up large parts of the state to coal-seam gas

development.

“The environmental impacts of this project on bushland, threatened species and water expose the fact that this is not a clean, green development,” he said.

“Eastern Star’s project will damage a nationally significant ecosystem and entrench an industry that the people of NSW have every right to be worried about.”