Ten years ago this blog set out to tell the real story of Rattlechain lagoon and its murky history, a history protected by authority and Britain’s dirty wartime past. It set out to show how industrial pollution affects the environment, wildlife and communities who are lied to by the polluters, their useless regulators and by the political class who ease the process of widescale dumping and then imaginatively use public money to convert said dumping sites into “quality homes”. The attempted cover up “remediation” of this site in 2013 was the starting point to tell a story which had been unfolding 14 years prior to this and for many more years before I came upon the scene as a direct witness.
In the early days I dutifully reported issues to the likes of The Environment Agency, Sandwell Council, the HSE and others only to be hit with a wall of incompetence and buck passing, and even attempting to stop me finding out the truth by the Veterinary Laboratories Agency. The public sector civil servants in these agencies are either shit at their jobs or bent, and nowhere is this more apparent in their help of the construction industry and developers in covering up historic pollution.
Hundreds of hours of work have gone into this website, visits around the country and a treasure trail of information uncovering the past deeds of bent bastards and shady Government dealings.
In many ways I have succeeded in these endeavours and will continue to expose those who seek to cover up the grimy past of disgusting companies like Albright and Wilson and Rhodia, their apologists and cronies in office. I would like to thank Steve, Tony Larner, Adam Aspinall, and Danny Halpin for their help and advice in bringing matters into the public domain amongst others.
As for the lagoon, Rhodia/Solvay’s bogus remediation scheme is not complete, and it is vital that people are aware of why they did not cap the secondary small lagoon with a geotextile membrane during their 2013 cover up works.
Part of this site goes off the site onto The Autobase industrial estate and so does the historic contamination buried beneath the surface. The lagoon site is evolving phosphine gas, whatever lies they try to peddle otherwise, and it is impossible chemically that this is not happening which is why the smaller lagoon filters this via the causeway dividing path as an attenuation pond. They spent a large amount of money constructing a pier as part of the 2013 coverup works, only to pump water from the larger lagoon all this time as the smaller lagoon is too contaminated to allow discharge to the controlled waters of The Birmingham Canal. Come on Rhodia/Solvay, tell the truth and not your fucking semantic lies!
The bird deaths have continued to be recorded, though not in the numbers they once were, and we now no longer get any post mortems which would be inconvenient for the company concerned.
A dead swan next to the pier
As with the 1990’s, the next chapter involving this site will no doubt be the scheming bastards who wish to create houses around its perimeter and even on top if they can get away with it. Such is the likely endeavour of the Wealdstone Raider Riddler and the Walsall Penguin from his Pheasey Legoland fiefdom in protecting their “precious” green belt land. We are also likely to get “Blair Witch project 2” as a government in the next 3 years just to make matters even worse, but really there is little difference. 😥 We should all watch that public money is not given to such schemes and plans in “cleaning up” private “brownfield” land, landbanked away for decades via some tax evasion orifice. The construction industry is now out for all it can like a drowning rat basking in the last days of summer with any land it can grab for houses in urban areas being swallowed. The ownership of former public land owned by Severn Trent Water is being marketed by political actors who fail to ever speak out on this private company Coventry crapster water fraud- I wonder why?
“Keep out of the green and in the brown, nice views for Tories and fuck the towns.”
WMCA “Garden cities”- They just love it in the brown
The most important thing about this site is that people are aware of white phosphorus and its lethal and evil use. There is no legitimate use for this unnatural chemical weapon, its manufacture and sale; there never has been, and its effects on wildlife and people need to be known so that military liars and Governmental murdering scum do not get away with calling it “smokescreen” any longer.
