Today, Safe Waste in Shropshire members visited Chineham near Basingstoke. Chineham has the same kind of incinerator as is planned for Shrewsbury and which Veolia hopes will burn Shropshire's waste.The residents we met described the incinerator as their 'silent and deadly neighbour'. Pictured here is the Chineham incinerator. The sheer size and ugliness of this plant in a rural setting is a real shock. Imagine what it might look like at the Battlefield site proposed for it.
The Chineham residents told us about the processes which had led up to their losing the battle against the incinerator. The 'done deal', the manipulated 'consultation', the railroading of the planning process and the assumption of compliance among both residents and elected representatives has left a legacy of bitterness and cynicism in an area of the country not noted for dissent.
It is time for Shropshire people to wake up and realise what is being done under their noses before it is too late and we, like the people of Chineham, find ourselves with a 'silent and deadly' neighbour.
Here is a reminder of the sort of company we are dealing with. Veolia is a global, multi-billion dollar mega-corporation which has not grown so rich on caring about people's health or well-being. They have many incarnations, of which Veolia ES Shropshire is just one of the latest. Look at one of their American cousins and what they are getting up to in Texas, USA:
http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/dayton_vx/dayton_vx.html
The Army's deadly VX waste is burning in Port Arthur Smokestacks at Veolia Incinerator Facility near Port Arthur, Texas. PORT ARTHUR, TX -- "Once again an impoverished Texas neighborhood, in this case in the town of Port Arthur, has become the disposal point for hazardous waste, only this time the waste is potentially so lethal that a drop the size of a pinhead can kill. A chemical-weapons facility in Indiana is destroying obsolete weapons containing VX nerve agent, producing caustic wastewater that the Army is shipping to Veolia Environmental Services for incineration. The Army
has claimed the waste is no more dangerous than kitchen cleaners. But when environmental scientists began looking at the disposal process, they found scary scenarios. The 'neutralized' waste still contains some VX, and the incinerators might not destroy all of it. There are no monitors on the incinerator smokestacks to sound the alert if it isn’t eliminated. And VX components in the water could reconstitute in shipping tanks under certain conditions, endangering lives along the transportation route," Rusty Middleton, The Texas Observer.
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