By The Mushroom.
If I was to offer you a glass of water saying; “Incidentally it’s poisoned but I can’t tell you with what or how much because if I do I will lose a £1 million, but don’t worry because I’ve got your best interests at heart.’ Would you drink it?
No. Okay, what if I said it was £10 million or £100 million at stake? As I push the glass towards you I smile and say: ‘After all, it’s just a question of money, isn’t it’!
You might answer that the question isn’t money at all. You might say it has everything to do with you rolling about on the floor, foaming at the mouth. Alarmist that you are!
But let’s concentrate on the price, not your feared demise, because so much of what the great and the good refuse to tell us is excused by that catch all, cover up, ‘commercial confidentiality.’
So what’s the true price? Well about £1, if AWM’s perception of public interest is anything to go by. Back in April I blogged that the regional regeneration agency, Advantage West Midlands, had refused a freedom of information request for data on levels of contamination on land it owns, on the grounds it could harm the public purse. The land in question is the former IMI site in Darlaston and I have blogged on it’s future and ‘secret’ plans to turn it into an open cast mine on a number of occasions, starting here. Despite my wittering, Walsall council finally admitted to the open cast element of its plans after the Birmingham Post got on its case. (See, not all journalists are Satan’s minions.)
AWM’s refusal is now being appealed to the Information Commission in London; a process that, despite the best intentions of the commission’s officers, can take months if not years. But there are more ways to skin a cat and more people with that information than just AWM.
The Environment Agency, is a government body set up to protect you and me, and the country we live in. Now the data I obtained, first off, only related to heavy metals on the land. That is copper, nickel, zinc and the housewife’s favourite, arsenic.
Given that it is the site of a former copper works though, it’s a good place to start. Second, the information said that contamination at surface levels was, on the whole, no threat to people and residents in the nearby area. Important that and useful information to have, if you want to make an informed choice. But it went on to reveal that the site has literally hundreds of former mine workings and shafts on it. And contamination at the bottom of these shafts, 25 metres or so, is frankly astronomic.
To explain, contamination levels are measured in ug/ls or micrograms per litre.
Now the EA has set basic benchmarks for ug/l’s in surface water, called Environmental Quality Standards or EQSs. When it comes these metals they are; 28 ug/l for copper, 200 for nickel, 500 for zinc and 50 for arsenic.
On the former IMI site, typical background readings range from clean up (whatever that is?) to 2000 ug/l for copper, 4000 for nickel, 3,500 for zinc and a mere 40 for arsenic. But at 25 metres, the levels are, certainly to this untrained eye, frightening. In order again, they are; 65,000 ug/l for copper, 76,000 for nickel, 15,000 for zinc and 7,000 for arsenic. Or put another way, the levels of contamination exceeded EQSs by 2321 times the benchmark for copper, 380 for nickel, 30 for zinc and 140 for arsenic.
‘Well that’s okay,’ you might say. ‘After all they are 25 metres down. No harm to people.’
Little problem here, AWM, Walsall council and their business partner, Parkhill Estates want to turn the site into an open cast mine as ‘part’ of cleaning it up. How deep will that mining go? We don’t know. What effect will it have on exposing this contamination? We are not being told. And the next question is can we trust these organisations to tell us in the future? Well Walsall Council, wasn’t very forthcoming when the question of mining was first raised, was it!
Lastly, that £1. Since first blogging about this story, the mushroom has learned that AWM bought the site for all of £1 in 2007. Given the cost of cleaning up the site (estimated in millions) and the fact that the price of land overall has dropped in recent years, the chances of AWM selling the site for much more than it bought it for are highly unlikely. So, it’s refusal to reveal the information asked for on the grounds of protecting the public purse is incomprehensible.
The clean up of this site is clearly needed but the coal mining is another question but we won’t get to know the full picture until people in AWM stop treating us like children. We are not, though many of us have children, children we want to remain safe. To be bulldozed into a situation by either being lied to by omission or being denied information, amounts to an attack on our rights and the rights of our kids.
