Belle first became involved with the development when she was approached by Murray Buchanan, an employee of the council's environment department, who wanted her to write a story for him. He explained that the council had recently contracted an area for a new development but that the area had been used back in the 1960s as a dump for toxic waste. He had been refused permission to carry out a full test of the area and was worried that the construction work would expose the town to toxic substances.
Belle reluctantly agreed to follow up Murray's suggestion that as a former councillor Alf might know something about what had happened and he angrily denied any wrongdoing. With a meeting being held at the surf club to discuss the proposal, Belle roped Martha and Ruby into handing out fliers about the toxic waste. She and Murray interrupted the meeting to reveal their evidence that the soil contained heavy metals but Murray's fumbling presentation and the development spokesman David Morris producing an independent survey that indicated the area was clean reduced them to a laughing stock and the vote went in the developers' favour.
Belle and Murray organised a protest at the development site during which Belle chained herself to one of the construction vehicles but Murray failed to turn up. When some of the other protestors turned violent, Belle and everyone else ended up being arrested. The developers wanted them all charged with trespass but Angelo persuaded Jack to let Belle and the others who remained peaceful off with a warning. Belle learned Murray no longer worked for the council and persuaded Angelo to get her his address. She arrived to find him packing up to leave and he told her he had been wrong and had resigned because he was embarrassed. She was left feeling foolish until Angelo told her he'd checked Murray's bank records and $20,000 had been paid into his account...it seemed he had been bought off.
Belle was then contacted by Enid Clay, who told her that her husband Arthur, a former member of the council, was ill in hospital and wanted to speak to her. He explained that the council had been in financial strife back in the 1960s and had taken money from a company to dump the waste in an area that was supposed to be listed as unsuitable for development and that the records listed it as general landfill. Having heard about the development, he was willing to tell the police everything. Belle persuaded Angelo to come to the hospital with her to take a statement but when they arrived they Arthur had suffered a massive stroke and he died before he could repeat his story. Belle related the incident to Alf, who trusted Arthur's word and suggested she contact Gary Rogers, a long-serving council records officer, for information. He proved unhelpful however and when she sneaked into the storeroom to find the records for herself, she found that everything from 1965, the year the waste was dumped, had been removed.
Belle asked Aden to help her break into the development office but he refused and she was horrified when he then took a job at the site, fearing that he and the other workers were in danger. He eventually agreed to help her but they aborted the attempt at a very early stage when they were spotted by a security guard and had to pose as a courting couple. Aden later found a map in the office with an area marked with a strange code, which differed from the one issued to the workers. He managed to get Belle a copy but before she could properly examine it she received a call saying Aden had been injured at work. She rushed to the development to be informed by the foreman, Tim Coleman, that there had been no accident and Aden had been laid off. When she returned home, she found that someone had broken into her room and taken the map. She then received a phone call saying that if she continued the investigation she and her "boyfriend" would be harmed.
As a result of the threat, Belle abandoned her investigation until Annie mentioned that a school experiment had shown that the soil surrounding the site contained a high level of arsenic. Belle suspected the toxic waste had already leaked and, on learning arsenic was a carcinogenic, that it was responsible for the high number of cancer cases in people living nearby. She and Aden took their findings to Rachel, whose own research showed a high proportion of cancer patients lived in the surrounding streets. She also informed Angelo but when he passed the information on to his superiors they felt there was insufficient evidence to subpoena medical records. Belle decided to get the records herself and asked Rachel for the names of the cancer patients. Rachel was reluctant to break patient confidentiality but eventually gave Belle a list of names without mentioning their medical history. Belle met with little success until she came across Dane Smith, whose stepson Joe had died of cancer recently and who believed himself responsible. With Rachel's help, she managed to convince him that wasn't the case and he ended up giving consent to Joe's records being used as evidence.
Belle also managed to get in touch with Murray and told him what she had discovered. He claimed that the pay-off he had received was an advance payment from his new employers but then went and tried to sell information on what Belle was up to, to Tim. Belle managed to get six other people to sign the consent forms but as she was on the way to the hospital her car was run off the road and while she was in hospital the consent forms were taken from the vehicle. Belle worried that the developers would now lean on the people that had agreed to help her and threaten them into remaining silent.
Murray apparently had an attack of conscience and contacted Belle to let her know the developers were planning to remove the waste drums. The pair sneaked to the site and took photos of Tim and his men with the clearly damaged drums. As they were leaving, though, Angelo called Belle to warn her Murray's new employers were the company behind the development. Belle panicked and locked Murray out of her car but the vehicle failed to start, then they were both spotted by Tim and forced to flee. After a chase through the bush, Belle ran into Angelo and Constable Watson but they were unable to find any sign of Murray, who had had the camera with him, and by the time they arrived back at the site the waste drums were long gone.
Tim handed the smashed remains of the camera in to the police, claiming one of his drivers had accidentally driven over it. However, when Belle came to collect it she discovered that the memory card handed in wasn't hers; the card containing the photos of the waste might still exist. In fact Murray had it and secretly left it in Belle's room. Before she had a chance to retrieve it, or even find out it was there, a crook hired by the developers broke into her room and stole it, then knocked Belle down and beat her when she walked in on him.
It took Belle a long time to realise the developers were responsible for attacking her: She initially suspected Angelo, who she had been arguing with immediately beforehand, then seemed to accept the explanation that the real culprit, Nobby, was just an opportunistic burglar. Furthermore, soil samples from the site showed no trace of toxicity and Belle was left feeling it was all for nothing. Then she saw Angelo with Nobby and he admitted that she had been right about the toxic waste and he was using Nobby to try and expose them. When Belle went to Angelo's house to talk to him however, they were both attacked by a hitman sent by the developers and would have been killed if Jack hadn't rescued them.
Partly as a result of being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and then hospitalised after the formal disaster, Belle played little part in eventually resolving the situation and when she heard Jack had been killed she was both wracked with guilt that her actions might have contributed and terrified she would be next. After Angelo confessed his part in both Jack's death and tampering with the soil samples, a second set of samples proved Belle had been right and the development was closed down. Feeling she needed closure, Belle wrote an article for the paper in which she spoke of how they could never bring back those who could died or help those still suffering from cancer but could only make sure that it never happened again.
