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NEWS November 09 2001
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| The Private Sector brings you: Privatised Toxic Waste for Kids The ongoing scandal of Welsh plans to allow the building of PFI-funded schools on former waste dumps in Llandudno and Newport (see news updates 6/7/01) has taken an interesting turn as the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Peter Clarke, has said he will attempt to halt the plan for Llandudno if a technical and scientific briefing fails to reassure him that the site is safe. This is the first positive move in a story which has seen parents and other concerned locals campaigning for their children’s health in the face of monumental callousness and incompetence from local councils and the devolved Welsh Assembly. Both Conwy (which covers Llandudno) and Newport borough coucils are demanding scientific evidence that the planned sites for the schools (in Llandudno, a former gasworks, contaminated with oil waste, heavy metals and subterranean methane, and in Conwy a municipal tip formerly used by Monsanto for dumping unidentified waste chemicals) are unsafe before they will take any action. This is in defiance of both the precautionary principle and basic common sense (how do you prove something is unsafe without staging an accident?) as well as all existing evidence; when samples were taken at the Newport site, soil sampling set off small explosions. Meanwhile the National Assembly is denying any responsibility, even though they passed the original legislation saying that no action can be taken on contaminated land until ill health has occured and been proven to result from the contamination. The preferred bidders for the PFI scheme in Llandudno are construction firms McAlpine and Balfour Beatty (yes, the same fimr involved in the Ilisu Dam project and whose lax safety procedures are widely held responsible for the Hatfield train crash); the Newport scheme is not yet advanced enough to know which companies are involved. Since the schemes are under PFI, however, campaigners trying to find out what is going on are constantly faced with an impenetrable wall of ‘commercial confidentiality’, as councils try to hide their undemocratic proceedings while sucking up to the businesses taking their money. Contact: Lesley McCarthy mcCarthylesley@aol.com 02920 711232 Links: News updates 6/7/01 ‘Toxic Waste for All’ http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/news/toxic_waste_1.html |