from Sunday Herald, 14 March 2010
Public authorities have been accused of failing to protect people from an old wartime factory blamed for contamination and illness on a housing estate in Lanarkshire.
Homes for 400 people were built on a site near Watling Street in north Motherwell that used to house a huge military plant in the 1940s. There is evidence that it handled toxic metals, hazardous chemicals and radioactive materials.
But the plant was not mentioned in a series of environmental surveys in the 1980s and 1990s carried out for the government’s development agencies. Instead there were only vague references to an “engineering works”.
Reports released under freedom of information law show that attempts to clean up the site in 1993 and 1994 to make it ready for housing development left behind patches of contamination by arsenic, cadmium and other heavy metals in breach of safety limits. No surveys were done for radioactive pollution.
Residents from the area complain of severe headaches, nausea and diarrhoea, which they blame on contamination. They met with experts and lawyers last week and agreed to pursue legal action for the health problems they are suffering.
"There are so many serious unanswered questions about this site that people are suspicious,” said Elizabeth Craigmyle, a partner with BMK Wilson in Glasgow, which represents ten local families.
“Why did none of the surveys done in the 1980s and 1990s mention the site's history as a wartime munitions factory? Why has there been no monitoring for radioactive contamination when on the available evidence it appears that radium was used there?”
Craigmyle has assembled evidence suggesting that the factory, run by Metropolitan Vickers for the Ministry of Defence and employing over 1,000 people, used the radioactive isotope, radium, to make luminous dials and clocks. There was also work on x-ray equipment, munitions and several other activities.
She has brought in Robert Kalin, an international specialist on contaminated land and a professor of environmental engineering at Strathclyde University, to investigate. She has also involved the English lawyers, Des Collins and Danielle Holliday, who recently won a major case against Corby Council on contamination at a former steelworks.
One local resident, Barrie Redington (62), has been investigating the site’s history, and dug up photographs, documentation and eyewitness accounts. “I think the factory is to blame for health problems," he said. "A lot of us have been going to the doctor, falling ill with headaches, nose bleeds and other things.”
Liz and Craig Butler, who live in Tiber Avenue on the Motherwell estate, said they started suffering bad headaches and extreme tiredness after they moved in four years ago. But the symptoms disappeared whenever they went to stay somewhere else.
“We were never told that this was a brownfield site,” Liz Butler (49) stated. “I’ve no problem if it’s been properly cleaned up, but I’ve a big problem if it hasn’t been properly cleaned up.”
A report in July 1994 on the clean-up of the site by a firm of consulting engineers and the former Strathclyde Regional Council’s chemist said that not all contamination had been removed. A layer of toxic ash and slag had been lifted and dumped on an adjacent site, but some had been left around a power cable, under trees and on perimeter slopes.
And after the clean-up, about fifty samples of soil still contained concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, nickel and other metals above “action levels”, according to the report. Some samples were three or four times higher, with one being ten times higher.
Before the clean-up, an earlier expert report warned that the concentrations of metals in the ground would be toxic for plants or vegetables. The contamination “could be harmful if ingested by children”, said a report for the Scottish Development Agency in 1991.
In response to residents’ concerns, North Lanarkshire Council has launched an investigation of the site. This will include a radiological survey, with the advice of the government’s Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
But the council doubted whether there was a serious problem. The evidence of contamination “lacks detail” and a local leaflet campaign was causing “alarm and distress” to some residents,” said the council’s pollution control manager, Charles Penman.
“All parties concerned in acting on this complaint are satisfied all relevant checks were carried out to ensure the land was fit for purpose when it was built on in the 1980s and 90s. We are nonetheless taking this matter seriously.”
my partner lived in Forum Place, Motherwell the same estate for years, she developed asthma while living there
Posted by: Barry Scott | 25 May 2010 at 08:02 PM