What Lies Beneath Rattlechain Lagoon?

Another instance of parental neglect combined with the dangers of phosphorus was reported in The Loughborough Echo of 22nd August 1913. 

It is revealed that two brothers, one aged ten and the other twelve had been playing with a crude but still viable firearm. Their engineer father obviously had more to do with this contraption than is mentioned in the article, as it involved what appears to be his workshop where the tragedy took place.

The phosphorus from a box of matches, I would assume red in this case, was used as the “gunpowder” with a lead bullet put into the barrel. The contraption was secured in a vice with one brother standing in the line of fire in the shed.  Dick committed fratricide by inadvertently firing the gun by the action of friction with the phosphorus.

Playing with matches was a painful lesson for poor George who was shot through the heart with the bullet.

Some of the former Albright and Wilson Uk sites of dire toxic pollution and environmental disaster

In the last post, I looked at the former website of this then international company. One of the astounding things on this 1998 ish piece was its claimed 150 year “brief history”, up to that point, “brief” being the operative word indeed!

Of course, they would not get the chance to update this, as they went caput in 2000, being swallowed up by the Rhodia onion eaters.

None of their history of course involved their PR disasters, accidents and fatalities on their sites, and their environmental record of shame, far in contrast to the bullshit lies on their website about corporate responsibility and environmental protection. The Albright and Wilson toxic archive links on this website tell the real story of AW, throughout their years of destruction and vile pollution. Of course, there is no mention of places like Rattlechain Lagoon- and the story of this site is told chronologically at this page.

Here is a summary with relevant links to Albright and Wilson’s real 150 years of history, the part that they conveniently left out, and the only history worth knowing. It’s been an interesting jigsaw puzzle reviewing this list of the macabre and downright shocking, and who knows what may yet come to light…..

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GRIME

1851 Albright and Wilson partnership founded.

1899 AW worker Eli Guest Killed and several other workers badly injured following explosion of steam from boiler. 

1902 Several men badly burnt following an “alarming” gas explosion at the works. 

1939 Munitions worker James Pinel charged and found guilty of sabotaging works equipment by attempted arson attack. 

1940/50’s The legendary “Oldbury smell” gave rise to a slew of complaints concerning pollution and ill health in the Oldbury area and further afield.

1948 Director Thomas Ashton commits suicide at the site, in relation to his work. 

1952 Phosphorus blaze in Trinity Street factory. 

1953 Another fire at Trinity Street destroys an office and single story block roof. 

1955 Research chemist Phillip Carter commits suicide, also blamed on his work at Oldbury. 

1955 Maintenance fitter George Buck dies of fatal injuries after being showered with white phosphorus at the AW Portishead factory, just two years after it had opened. 

1959 Phosphorus pentasulphide fire at the site requires firemen with breathing apparatus to tackle it. 

1960 Phosphorus fire explosion at the plant requires a three hour battle from firefighters to extinguish it. 

1963 Toluene gas explosion at Trinity Street injures 4 firemen. 

1967 Worker Thomas Gough dies in another explosion at the oil additives plant in Trinity Street. 

1968/69 Disastrous Placentia Bay fish deaths at AW’s flagship new Long Harbour plant killed millions of fish and destroyed the ecosystem with phossy water pollution- from phosphorus production. Albright and Wilson neared bankruptcy with the closing of this plant.

Dec 1972 Worker receives “severe burns to the face, neck and buttocks” following exposure to phosphorus substance. 

Jan 1974 27 workers overcome by chlorine gas fumes at Trinity Street. 

1976 white phosphorus fire en route to rattlechain lagoon when waste catches fire. 

1982 Chemical process employee at Trinity Street loses leg and has other foot mangled due to AW negligence. He would only receive compensation from them 11 years later through the courts. 

February 1986 A blaze at the works missed by works firemen who were watching a fire training video!

June 1986 Employee burned by phosphorus at Trinity Street, the first of two fires in six hours at the site. 

July 1986 Derailment of white phosphorus train in Ohio US leads to massive casualties due to toxic release of gases and fire. 

June 1988 Phosphine gas fire following explosion at Trinity Street. 

July 1989 Albright and Wilson IS FINED ….FOR ALLOWING RADIOACTIVE DUST TO BLOW AROUND A DOCKSIDE SITE at Portishead. This in contrast to lies published in Albright World about the operation.

July/September 1989 Two fires involving the chemical phosphorus sesquisulphide pour more spotlight over safety at this factory. 

October 1989 White phosphorus fire at Rattlechain lagoon sparks interest in the site from concerned residents and unsuspecting councillors. 

February 1990 Workers at Trinity Street flee orange toxic acid cloud released. 

February/March 1990 Foul gas given off at Trinity Street blamed on “faulty equipment”

August 1990. Massive phosphorus drum fire at Portishead site

October 1990 Greenpeace take Albright and Wilson to court in a private prosecution winning case under the 1989 Water Act for pollution from their Whitehaven works. 

December 1990 5o tonnes of white phosphorus reported to have caught fire sending plumes of toxic gas across Langley. 

June 1991. Explosion at AW’s Charleston plant producing phosphorus chemicals in the US killed 9 men and injured many more. 

Jan 1992 A train carrying 50 tonnes of white phosphorus caught fire on delivery to the Trinity Street factory, emitting toxic gas. 

October 1996. A large fire at AW’s Avonmouth plant after ludicrous health and safety mix up of containers.

‘Albright and Wilson fined £60,000 after explosion at chemical plant’, Safety Management, July/August 1999, p8, British Safety Council.

1999 onwards –Dead birds appear at Rattlechain lagoon and are first documented to be dying on this “lake of death” after being poisoned by white phosphorus. 

Albright and Wilson paid liars like these to deceive their own workforce and the communities in which they operated.

It’s just a pump to the left……

I’ve recently come across some pages on the excellent Internet archive page concerning the former Albright and Wilson, at the end of their demise from around 1998. This is interesting as it relates to the same time period where I first noticed dead birds suspiciously turning up dead on their secretive waste dump in Tividale- not something that ever made it onto their PR bullshit web of deceit.

At this point in time, they were operating under the catch line “Chemicals for everyday living”.  😐 

A far more accurate summary of their activities

At this point in time, websites like this were fairly basic and organised into sections shown below, which we will look at in turn. The first “corporate info” is typical of these chemical liars.

“Albright & Wilson attaches the highest priority to the protection of the health and safety of its employees, customers, neighbours and others who may come in contact with, or be affected by, its operations or products. It recognises equally its duty to protect the environment both in the vicinity of its operations and elsewhere by responsible management of waste materials.”

Well, all I can say to that is that this website contains a dossier of evidence to the contrary, which I will be setting out in the next post. Its activities negatively affected peoples’ lives for decades with the smells, accidents, fires and explosions, whilst also burning its workforce and gassing them with toxic chemicals and rotting their jaws. Oh, and don’t forget the prosecutions….

Their manual was not worth shit.

We know their boasts about the environment are fake, given that around all of their sites there were major accidents and spillages- Oldbury, Portishead, Whitehaven, Avonmouth….

At this point in time they were still a multinational company with the following structure

…and then goose steps to the right

By now of course, there were no more Albright and Wilson’s left with the demise of Kaiser Bill in 1980.

The Jockey horror picture show….meet the fuckers…

Even more toe-curling is their own view of their history up to this point, “Brief” indeed, and missing many public relations disasters. There would not be many more years left for them however 😆

but it’s the phosphorus sludge, that really drives you insane….

Of course, it is the chemicals themselves that are of most interest, and we get a full breakdown of the terrorists at work. The production of these toxic substances was split into three main sections, “Speciality chemicals”, “phosphate and phosphate derivatives”, and “surfactants”.

Oldbury was an example of a speciality chemicals site.

I won’t go through the entire list, but here are the chemicals related to phosphorus specialities and derivatives. These include the standard phosphorus trichloride and phosphorus oxychloride. To think that the shite from these processes went into rattlechain lagoon is of course omitted from the boasts of this website. Of course, we know that the cancer causing “round- up” of Monsanto’s glyphosate mixture were also made possible under the agricultural intermediates of this subgroup.

Of course, they made a fortune out of producing this toxic crap.

Incredibly, seven years earlier 9 men had been killed in an explosion at one of their Amercian sites in Charleston.  There is no mention of this on this website at this time, no regret, no memorial, and not a fuck given…..

There is however an opportunity to comment, where no doubt you would be “assured” that there was a “very unlikely event” of a calamity befalling anyone in the surrounding area of one of their death-trap establishments.

Here’s one that would probably have not gone down too well at Trinity Street Towers, but the truth though…

……LET’S DO THE GRIME WARP AGAIN! 

AW’s anchor- He’s got a golden ticket……

The Albright and Wilson families were truly revolting characters. I have looked at Arthur Albright and two of his Grandchildren and their demise, but another, William Albright, the son of John, is a special case in terms of his longevity and involvement in destroying the local area with the factory in Langley.

I have written a biography of this war dodging chump already, and this should be read in conjunction with this post. The following however deals with the final curtain of his dealings with the Trinity Street phosphorus factory, at which at one time he ponced around as part of the Home Guard. This man of great privilege was born into the Quaker family empire phosphorus dynasty and would never have done anything else with his life if not for that.

“Albright World”- the company newspaper in his name which brainwashed their hapless umpa lumpa workforce with fake scientific claims and false statements about ill health caused by the chemicals that they were handling and making, recorded his official “retirement”- in reality he did nothing for work for his entire fucking life. This March 1980 edition lamented

“For the first time in the company’s history, there is no Albright on the A+W board. ”  🙁 

A phosphorus production unit

His links to Portishead are mentioned in the article, which bizarrely do him no favours at all given the fairly disastrous goings on here regards the later decommissioning of a plant that was not wanted by the local community at the time.

“Ernest recalled Bill’s ability to cut through red tape, and how he managed – through a friend- to obtain scarce materials without which the Portishead plant could not have been built.”

I have already uncovered that he was involved in an act of fraud during the war in attempting to use camouflage materials made by an AW sub company instead of that recommended by the War department at the time in covering the MOS factory at Trinity Street. The material was deemed substandard, and yet he argued the toss without declaring the vested financial interest from which AW would charge the Ministry of Supply. The robbing conning bastard him.

As for the favour granted by “a friend”, was this a “friend” of the weirdo cult society variety, or a funny handshake trouser leg roller, of which he almost certainly was?

It is stated that he was presented with a garden gate as well as a scroll at the special dinner. They appeared to love wining and dining in this way.

There are some recollections and embellishments about the man, and his interests in killing animals for fun.

Perhaps Billy plonker and Albright and Wilson missed a trick in promoting themselves and their “everyday chemicals” in giving local children the chance of a factory tour competition with a pack of Calgon. What a macabre spectacle it could have been, as they witnessed how to get gassed with chlorine, burnt by phosphorus, and poisoned with phossy jaw breakers.

There is little doubt that the hard-pressed folk of Langley were “holding their breath” and dreaming of “paradise” when living next to his stinking factory of smells and toxic chemicals for all of Bill Albright’s days there.

This latest find from the newspaper archive summarises other stories from The Birmingham Daily Post about the notorious “Oldbury Smell” of Albright and Wilson, and also throws in some more that I was not aware of previously. There is a good deal of stuff to break down in this article and what we now know about the lies of Albright and Wilson and the political figures protecting their filthy polluting business.

The article appeared in the 4th September 1953 edition where it states that neighbouring then borough Smethwick was up in arms about the waft of cat piss drifting over their town and had started a petition.

We get admission from an unnamed tosser of the company that the smell might continue, and even brazenly states.

“We hope it will not occur frequently…….we know it is horrible”. 

It references “new plant” that had been installed to allegedly stop it, which I looked at in this article.

We then enter the chronological timeline set out meticulously in the article.

Complaints were made in 1949, and I looked at the origins story HERE.

The slimy ass kissing scumbag, S. Melsom defended these polluting liars frequently, which I looked at HERE. 

This was in contrast to medical experts like Dr Barrada, who stated that gases produced in the reaction were likely to have damaging effects on human health.

As the 1950’s dawned, the Trinity Street pussy pongers claimed that the smell was on the way out. Despite this lie, evidence reached the Post that it had travelled to Handsworth, and it obviously now “a Brum Ting”.

In 1950, Melsom again defended his paymasters by using bureaucracy as an excuse to do nothing.

Dr Barrada again spoke out in 1952, when it obvious that the smell and promises that it would be dealt with came to nothing. Clearly, the borough of Smethwick was starting to put pressure on the cocksuckers from Oldbury protecting their backyard filthy business.

Unfortunately, they would be sucked into the short-lived borough of Warley themselves, thus neutralising the outpouring of disgust at their neighbours’ failures.

The smell would of course persist and become enshrined in local folklore.

OR MORE APT- BACKWARD IN TWATTERY”.

The demise of The West Midlands County Council in 1986 saw local authorities once again taking on the responsibility of waste management and matters involving regulation. In anticipation of this April Fools day handover, a piece in the 21st  March Coventry Evening Telegraph claimed that the new Hazardous Waste Unit as it would be called would regulate the activities. Quoted is none other than Thelma Hillman, who is now “assistant waste disposal officer for pollution control in The West Midlands”.  😆

You can see that from this, it was just business as usual, or polluting business as usual to be more apt. The WMCC had totally failed to stop flytipping waste crime of toxic waste, and had failed to ensure that licensing for tipping said hazardous waste was “tightly controlled” at all- as we can see from the useless fucking licences that they passed. Hillman and co during these dark years, were very much the problem and not the solution, and the name change brought no change at all, as we shall see.

A couple of years later, after the Walsall Council based cretins had assumed , or kept their roles, a piece from the Sunday Mercury 24th January 1988 posed the provocative question, “Why must we be turned into the world’s poison dustbin?”

The short answer to this is that The Conservative Government at the time, the ministers and the civil service were all bent and corrupt fucking stains who kept the system for polluting business growth. The article talks of that word “timebomb” in relation to toxic waste producing methane gas being evolved from landfill sites, but poorly links this to waste being imported from other countries.

We of course had the same article in 1971 bemoaning exactly the same thing.

Factually, the Mercury article is utter bollocks in this regard, given the waste that Britain and the rest of the developed world  itself exported to third world countries for young children to die from and cause them cancer and other health maladies. It is obviously intended to enflame tensions that existed around this time in that the West Midlands was receiving a disproportionate amount of this foreign crap, particularly with crook firms like Leigh Environmental and co handling it in the HWU back yard. “Our safety” the piece claims, is all down to the Walsall based office wonders .  😮

We get a full PR treatment of this useless vessel. This anti foreign bullshit belies the fact that British firms like Albright and Wilson were poisoning their communities for decades and dumping fucking toxic waste in their communities unregulated, and when “regulated” by the likes of the HWU was a regulation not fit for purpose. Somehow, this red herring makes it more saleable to voters of a certain persuasion perhaps that it is a foreign problem, when the complete opposite is the case. Dirty Britain made it, dirty Britain dumped it. 

It states that 40 people are employed in this team, with Hillman playing a prominent role.

She makes some very prophetic comments, the most shocking being

“I worry about the future and the problems that we are storing up… we have good records of what has been put where, but you never know what will happen in 30 or 40 years. Records can get lost”. 

Well, dear Thelma, all I can say to that is your records at the WMCC were fucking shite. You personally were unable to point out where 250,000 gallons of toxic waste had been tipped on a new housing estate, so did not know “what had been put where”, let alone the records of waste dumping before licensing at places such as Rattlechain lagoon which they did not know anything about at all! 

I’m not sure how a civil servant came to talk to the press in this way, or whether it was even apt to do so, but it was not the first time she had done this, as a 1981 New Scientist article titled “Toxic waste- the political connections” again quotes her bemoaning the lack of political will and how lack of staff will lead to fly-tipping waste disposal “cowboys” operating. This was during the time of the WMCC and there had now just been a change in political leadership of that council from Labour to Conservative. One might question the political motives of an officer making comments of this type. 😕 The Lords Select Committee obviously failed to take anything on board or make any meaningful contribution to the debate. 

As for the 30-40 years she speaks of, we know of course that thanks to her team who morphed and got jobs in the Environment Agency, the records were quite deliberately obfuscated, the chemicals hidden from members of the public into meaningless phrases,  probably for the same bent political bastards in Government who now pursue “brownfield first” building on the said toxic time bomb sites for their crook developer party political donors!

I wonder how many of those working for this team at this time went into environmental consultancy for the bent land banking house building sector?

The final joke is that the unit is considered ” a centre of excellence” in the UK, but that “standards were slipping”. I honestly cannot believe how out of touch this woman was with reality at this time, but perhaps at least she did not jump ship like at least two of her  treacherous colleagues, who obviously knew that there was more money to be made in the private sector of helping firms avoiding being caught than catching the criminals at work.

The only thing that she is right about is the lack of political will to change the situation, though this was apparent, and remains apparent with all Governments since this article was written. Perhaps the HWU speaking out about foreign waste thought that there were votes to be made in talking up imported foreign waste instead of that made locally? This perhaps shows how apathetic people are, but only because they were not told of the real risks of the chemicals- by those who had worked at the West Midlands County Council to start with.

They added the mercury tilt switches by bloody useless licences, and set double wires by the pathetically worded conditions which created loopholes in themselves. The fuses were set by them, and they should own that instead of talking shite.

Nice to put a face to the waste…..of space

Just a few months later, the same title followed up with a piece on 12th March 1989.

A Government Select committee, (yet another one just 8 years after the Lords),  had looked into waste disposal issues, and concluded that the system was crap. The trouble with scrutiny committees of MP’s such as this is that that put forth some holier than thou points urging urgency, yet are safe in the knowledge that nothing will change. It is their role to play the alarmist, because it generates them headlines, and only continues the system of political failure when nothing happens. We were now 17 years after The Deposit of Poisonous Wastes Act, and 15 years after The Control of Pollution Act, so all failures of these laws were on Parliament themselves, and no one else. A Conservative talks of “near misses” yet is blind to places such as Rattlechain lagoon which were not near misses, they had been allowed to happen, as had all the other SL licences passed by the WMCC.

The article mentions Hillman and the MP’s who share her concerns, but also astutely states;

“But where are the politicians and the environmentalist lobby when it comes to the unglamorous question of toxic waste buried under the feet of ordinary people here in the West Midlands? “

Quite right, because today in 2022 they are all veering us away with the bollocks of “climate change” ,planned  policies of globalist change and coercion, taking us away from local issues and happy to build houses on top of these toxic waste tips. I know history will record how such environmental groups , (probably political plant confederates), and politicians were all really just pissing in the same pot.

In the report, Rossi talks a good fight, but is blind to what he is actually stating.

“All old landfill sites are suspect. Nobody knows what chemistry is taking place. No testing is done, no monitoring. “

Well, is that not what the licensing system was supposed to do when introduced by Parliament and upheld by the likes of Thelma Hillman? FFS!

The Mercury also states that the report does not mention any single tip or location- thus its authors were part of the problem, blowing hot air and protecting the system they were claiming to condemn. This is why politicians of the like of Hugh Rossi are not to be trusted when coming out with hot air headlines such as this. They are nothing but cowards, and are totally insincere in changing things. Theirs is a world where they cosy up to CEO’s of scum like Leigh Environmental and Albright and Wilson, or even become their advisers such as at least two fuckwit MP’s were doing at this time. They then claim credit for reductions in what they are doing instead of outright bans. No one of course can possibly measure this horseshit or prove it is happening.

It does mention the unfolding Leigh Environmental protests in Walsall and the distrust of people in the operation being regulated properly.

Some 33 years later, nothing has changed at all, and the timebomb fuse is still ticking. Unfortunately, it will have exploded in some people who have had their homes built on toxic tips in the form of cancers which they will have to prove came from the crap that Hillman and co failed to stop happening all those years ago. Failures like Rossi have also snuffed it and are now, to use an apt paraphrased term for him “sleeping with the two headed fishes”, and that at least it is no loss at all. The records of toxic waste tipped and buried have been deleted for this very purpose, and this is the real legacy of The West Midlands County Council- complicit with industrialists in harming people and the Environment for purely economic gain. #SCUM. 

OR MORE APT- BACKWARD IN TWATTERY”.

This former quango is without doubt one of the worst examples of governance in modern history, with the role of waste disposal and pollution prevention being the rotting corpse in a grave that kept on leaking. For much of its existence it was steered by a bloke called  Ken Harvey, who I believe was nothing more than a Birmingham bins bloke foreman who suddenly found himself elevated to the souped-up role of “county waste disposal officer”, a role for which he was an absolute fucking failure and disaster, and architect of things that are still left over today from 40+ years ago. Of course the bunch of greasing turds in charge as c”o”unty councillors at this time are also culpable for passing waste disposal licences such as SL31 and their weak wording which allowed scum like Albright and Wilson to carry on polluting with little implications on them.

Their doomwatch sites, I have listed from these dark days of Harvey’s failure to control pollution , as well as showing how incompetent his officers were in that they could not even identify a location where 250,000 gallons of sulphuric acid had been dumped, after those who had done the crime had been prosecuted!

As well as the failure of licensing, it is clear that Harvey’s idiots were not even competent chemists or scientists, which would have come in quite handy in tackling and challenging deceitful liars like AW about their waste disposal activities.

Harvey and co passed a licence which allowed AW to dispose of one of the most toxic substances handled in the region, (white phosphorus),  into an urban watery lagoon, on the basis that it would be “safe” to let it oxidise in “small quantities”– as we know, hundreds of tonnes of it actually FFS!

What an absolute crock of shit! The process was neither “safe” and the amounts were not “small”. Albright and Wilson liars of the chemical industry.

Not only was the plant in which this cargo came from not competent in stopping pollution over decades harming people and the environment, but its dump was already known as a notorious hell in the middle of Dudley Port that was “a peril to children”.

When road tanker operation took over from canal barge, it was clear that the operation was still not safe, when material deposited at rattlechain was allowed to burn out. I looked at how a tanker carrying waste to rattlechain, including drums of toxic material had caught fire on route there from Trinity Street. 

This was from The May 16th 1976 edition of the Sandwell Evening Mail and therefore before the SL31 licence had been passed in 1978. You would have hoped that incidents such as this would have informed those passing the licence, or refusing to allow it to continue- well at least any reasonable person would.  🙄 

“An official enquiry has been launched into the incident in which highly combustible phosphorus waste caught fire in Oldbury while being transported by open lorry to a tip.

A full scale police and fire brigade alert was started when a 40 gallon drum containing the waste burst into flames. It was being driven through Oldbury to a Tividale tip from the Langley works of chemical manufacturers Albright and Wilson Ltd.

Mr Ken Harvey the county council’s waste disposal officer said “I would not consider this a satisfactory method of transporting such materials.

I am aware of the Albright and Wilson waste tipping operations but I am not aware that waste is being handled in this manner.

We intend to pursue this matter through discussions with the company because after this incident one must accept that present transportation arrangements are not entirely satisfactory.”

I discussed the paradox as to how Harvey could claim that the practice of transporting this waste was “not satisfactory” , yet allowing it to continue under his watch under a licence bearing his own name just months later.

What I have recently found through another article, is that Harvey’s claims and “enquiry” were absolutely nothing of the sort, and that any discussion with AW must have involved either brown envelopes of cash to look the other way , a freemason handshake, or ignoring any safety implications of continuing this operation, as it clearly did continue.

The 11th June 1976 Birmingham Mail is a shocking indictment of Harvey’s incompetence in his job, and that of the entire regulator. In less than one month, this white wash lie concluded that the firm were not to blame for the incident, of course clearing Harvey’s own useless organisation of any wrong doing themselves, in that they were quite happy for AW to have been doing this to start with.

What is more bizarre is that it recommended that the lorries should no longer be single crewed, rather than the highly flammable cargo being unsuitable to be carried through residential streets! I mean what the actual fuck are they talking about here?

Thirteen drums of p4 containing waste had left the site heading for rattlechain, when one caught fire- thus all them would have eventually.

“A spokesman said that Albright and Wilson were transporting this cargo with authority”. 

Yes of course, ultimately the ass clown Ken Harvey’s authority. 

Even more incredible is that the berk at WMCC, probably this lazy thick hopper tipper twat himself, claims that they did not know how the incident started. FFS! P4 catches fire when exposed to air, it really is that simple! 

There is also the absolute lie from the driver and AW that there was “a burst tyre”. This for me is typical of this company and their red herring bullshit which attempts to switch blame onto anything but the chemicals they fail to handle safely. I mean if a tyre had “burst”, how would the driver have been able to tour the area looking for somewhere to park when knowing that one of the drums was on fire behind him? He would have lost control of the vehicle and probably crashed. Did that happen; I think not? I also wonder as to whether the driver was pressured into making this fake claim to keep his job, nothing would surprise me at all with the management of this shameful operator.

Another provable lie is that AW steered clear of residential areas. THEY DID NOT! They were still using the same route described in the SEM article in the 2000’s !

The map below from the period shows both the former toxic trail by canal barge compared to the toxic trail by road. There may have been some variations of this route from Trinity Street via Shidas lane/Lower City Road for example, but I stalked these bastards along the route at the time in the 2000’s between loads, so I know what I am talking about.

Albright and Wilson’s Toxic trails, from factory to tip– blue the canal route, red the road route.

I am not sure how two men could have done anything differently than one, and it is clear that one man in a tanker continued to dump the waste all those years later when I first came across the scene in the 1990’s. WHAT IS CLEAR IS THAT ANY ONE MAN COULD HAVE DONE A BETTER JOB THAN KEN HARVEY DID, AND THAT THE OLD BOYS NETWORK OF MILITARY PAST DEEDS/CIVIL SERVICE BACK SCRATCHING FROM AW CONTINUED TO GIVE THEM SPECIAL PASSES TO DO WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY WANTED TO WITH AN APPARENT DIPLOMATIC INDUSTRIAL IMMUNITY. 

WMCC could not detect a white phosphorus fire if it came up and lit them up the arse.

I have looked previously at the location app called what3words in connection to rattlechain lagoon.  

Some of the 3 square metre locations within the site offer some pretty hilarious and relevant 3 word unique combinations. I think my favourite is the one below.

But something just popped in there like A LIGHT BULB the other day in my head as it often does from nowhere. I wonder if there is a place in all of the world that consists of everyone’s favourite most controversial waste disposal site that in itself consists of three words- RATTLE CHAIN LAGOON? Surely there would not be such a place that could have been so unlucky to have been assigned such a hellish namesake consisting of three square metres? WELL THERE IS! 

WHAT.THE.FUCK?

The location appears to be located near to a lagoon or lake with similar shape to our rattlechain!

But where in the world is this place, which also looks like it is in the middle of nowhere? The answer when I went to Google maps takes an even more bizarre twist, and I am starting to wonder if I am in either a bad lucid dream or someone is PULLING.MY.PLONKER.

Alaska!

Of course, rattechain lagoon has a connection with this state in the US given the white phosphorus military firing range at Ford Richardson alongside The Eagle River Flats where birds died as a result of white phosphorus poisoning, and the studies of which helped to confirm the link that birds on Rhodia’s LAKE.OF.DEATH were also dying after ingesting the BANNED.RAT.POISON. 

The scientists who were involved in these studies helped us enormously in the endeavour to unpick the mistruths that the Oldbury polluters were peddling, and even mentioned an article about the site in a remediation paper as to options for dealing with another contaminated P4 lagoon.

The area in Alaska of the other rattle chain lagoon is located South West of Anchorage and The Eagle River within the area known as The Lake and Peninsula Borough, or sometimes appears to be called “The Lake and Peninsula school district.” 

This is a very rural area with very few inhabitants and plenty of Grizzly Adams style critters, with the nearest populated area called Pilot Point.  

Isn’t it a small world! What I am sure about however is that whatever 3 square metre rocky outcrop RATTLE.CHAIN.LAGOON Alaska falls within, it would be a much safer place for man and beast that the white phosphorus CONTAMINATED.SHIT.HOLE  namesake in Oldbury England!

This white phosphorus misadventure involves yet another common theme, foolish youth associated with dangerous chemicals. I suppose some people never grow up and continue to play with them in industry- per Albright and Wilson.  😈

To Scotland then and the 2nd May 1951 Edinburgh Evening News , where a couple of wee Jimmies got more than they bargained for when playing with the Devil’s element.

Fan-dabi-implozi !

Apparently, the two Glaswegian youngsters did not know that Phosphorus has to be stored in water, and again one of them put it in their pocket after nicking some from school. Obviously, his behind or jock parts were badly burned in the incident, which also affected passengers on the tram who tried to douse the flames. No time for trainspotting here then.  😆

So I suppose the moral of the story is, if you are going to put P4 in your pocket, it might help to keep it moist.  😛  😆  😆

I think most people living next to a Control of Substances Hazardous to Health site, such as the Solvay plant in Langley, would like to know what those substances are, but why are Sandwell Council making this information difficult for people to access?

There is a major problem with Sandwell Council’s planning department in the way in which they are working for applicants and NOT for the public.

Many examples have come to light about officers scheming with developers who just happen to be party political donors, and also the scandal of land sales by a councillor on a committee to do so which benefitted his developer son- who also worked in the planning department at SMBC!

I have already given examples of my experiences with them in the form of the CCTV permissions at Rattlechain, and  with the Gower Tip fiasco, and now I have found more evidence of applications which Solvay put in regards Hazardous Substance consents,  (dangerous and flammable chemicals they can store and handle on site), which had reportedly been shelved, yet it now emerges that HS/040 was given consent in 2020.  👿

The history of this application is as follows. I have now also added a page to the list of HSC’s already put in the public domain on this website. THIS INFORMATION IS IMPORTANT FOR ANYONE LIVING IN THE AREA TO KNOW, BUT SANDWELL COUNCIL FOR WHATEVER REASONS KNOWN UNTO ITSELF APPEARS TO WANT TO HIDE IT FROM PUBLIC VIEW. 

I first mentioned this consent application after being contacted by a concerned resident of Langley in August 2018.

You can read about this in THIS POST.

I mentioned here that Sandwell council had deliberately removed all mention of detail of the hazardous substance consents at Trinity Street, as well as giving little information about this latest application. The only opinion I can form from the removal of this key information that was once there is that whoever instructed this or did this is a bent officer or a shill of this company. This is not an oversight, or anything else, it was an intentional and calculated obfuscation of information, and there is no valid reason in the public interest as to why it was done. Obviously, what is in Solvay’s interest is obviously more important to Sandwell Planning. 

I contacted Alison Bishop- yes her again, in the email below dated 27th July 2018. Needless to say, that like all the other attempts to contact this woman, she has to be reminded several times , or does not even have the courtesy to reply at all- as was the case here. I followed this up with the listed case officer Dean Leadon- and got no response either, only to be told at a later date, that he had left the authority. His name is still listed as the case officer on the application on the council website however.

With little time to object, the list of documents suddenly appeared on the council website. Ignore the first two, which I will talk about later. You can see they were uploaded in bulk and the date given is 26th July 2018. This was just one day before I had emailed Bishop.

I objected to this scheme, which can be read in the PDF below.

hs040 objection

After this, I emailed again asking for updates, and received absolutely nothing from the planning department.

I put in two freedom of information requests in early 2019 to The Environment Agency , and to The HSE.

The EA replied claiming that they had had no communication with the council- astounding given that they had been involved with the investigation into the fire and other matters at this site.

The HSE replied that in one document supplied, it could take them up to 26 weeks to respond as the application was being considered by a specialist unit due to the uncertainty of the situation. This consisted of Email dated 17/8/2018 from Sandwell Council to HSE containing revised Application form and Email dated 21st August 2018 to Sandwell Council with HSE attachment  Holding Letter.

I received no further updates from Sandwell council on this matter. The HSE comments have clearly NOT been uploaded to the SMBC website, and so we get the 17 MONTH GAP between talk of pipework, the reworded application, and then it being finally passed under delegated authority nearly a year later on 2nd October 2020.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE? AND OH THE IRONY OF LOCKING PEOPLE AWAY IN THEIR HOMES UNDER A “PANDEMIC” WHEN A FAR GREATER CHEMICAL RISK AWAITS ON THEIR DOORSTEP. OPEN THE WINDOWS AS WAS ADVISED BY HEALTH LIARS, AND YOU MIGHT BREATHE SOMETHING IN THAT REALLY DOES DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH FFS! 

There is too much going on out of the public eye between these SMBC planning officers and other agencies and the applicants. They appear to be pissing in the same pot, and it just will not do when it comes to compromising people’s safety and not allowing a chance to question decisions or examine the applications in a fair manner. They are covering up documents out of public view, and this is deliberate.

But it seems that another application was also put in unbeknown to me tabled HS/041 in    June 2021 . This too is a devious application which hides new chemicals being added to the list which were previously not registered as Hazardous substances on the site. I have also looked at the details of this application and the chemicals involved ON THIS PAGE. 

Something very odd appears to occur when planning applications are put in to Oldbury. I think there is a case that Sandwell council should be renamed

“The Spoon Council”. 

In fact, I think that the sculpture below would look just spiffing in Freeth Street, right outside The Oldbury Kremlin.