[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: EA audit report on ICI Runcorn
PRESS STATEMENT Tuesday 10.2.98
Environment Agency audit of ICI shows the tip of the Iceberg
In response to the Environment Agency's release today of the report from their special audit of the ICI/EVC Runcorn site last July:-
The Environment Agency's audit report of ICI Runcorn vindicates everything we have been saying:- This is a sloppily run site with inadequate maintenance. This report is even more damning because the Agency did not include in their audit, the plants which had the most incidents, because of pending prosecutions.
Given the many faults the Agency found in their audit, that leaves the questions:
1. Why did the Agency authorise these plants, given their state
2. Why did the Agency allow things to get so bad before they did this audit.
3. Why did the Agency's previous audit not reveal these problems?
4. What specific measures are the Agency going to enforce, to ensure that these problems are stopped, swiftly, and that this site is made genuinely safe and no longer a danger to health and to the environment.
We hope that the Environment Agency will continue to toughen their attitude and will ensure that ICI act faster to make this site safer and no longer a danger to health.
We note that yet again ICI, in their response to the Agency's report, cite as part of their "current improvement activity" "a £50 million investment to reduce significantly emissions to air and water". This refers to the first incinerator, long since built and limping into full use only a year or two late, due to many teething problems. This cannot reasonably be cited as part of their current improvement activities - it's already working!
We also object to ICI's constant reference to this dioxin-producing monstrosity as an "improvement", when it will only reduce existing emissions, from just a selection of plants, but only by 90%, and it is also adding dioxin and NOx into our air.
-ENDS-
Contact for further details: Viv Mountford 01928-566236
Industry & Pollution Activist, Halton FoE
Viv Mountford (Ms)
Industry & Pollution Activist
Halton Friends of the Earth Group, Cheshire, England
Email vivmount@greener.u-net.com
Phone (44)-1928-566236