After drawing attention to the mystery surrounding the sudden deaths of healthy birds on this chemical “hazardous waste” lagoon in the late 90’s, some articles appeared in the Express and Star newspaper concerning this and the eventual direct link with the chemicals contained in there being entirely responsible for the deaths. Comments made by Rhodia at the time– particularly by their health and safety director Tom Dutton, are now quite laughable, but entirely consistent with the liars at Trinity Street’s previous rebuttals of how their operations at their factory site affected the environment going back many years previous.
The article below appeared in the local paper on 18/3/2008. The linkage of the sediment to the deaths was of course the entire issue, the issue that Rhodia spinners like Dutton and other dishonest work managers at the factory had not gone into at meetings where they appeared mystified by why birds were dropping dead on their waste facility.
The fears that the birds had swallowed toxic materials were entirely accurate. The article deals with the then most recent death of a swan captured on video for the first time– which we now know from experts in the US was entirely consistent with white phosphorus poisoning of wildfowl seen in Alaska. So protective of their chemical endeavours, Rhodia did not even bother to inform those undertaking post mortems of the risks posed by those chemicals- as was revealed when I enquired to the AHVLA conducting them. I called here for the sediment to be tested- which of course would reveal the level of p4 in the accessible sediment.
From Express and Star 18/3/2008
The quote from Dutton below gives away nothing, just spin and no direct answer to my hypothesis which he knew was correct.
In January of 2009, the serious chemical fire at the Rhodia Trinity Street factory brought renewed attention on their entire operations. The claim by Rhodia that “the lagoon does not contain any chemical that caused the fire at the Rhodia Oldbury site on January 2nd” is absolutely false.
From the HSE report into the fire on 2nd January 2009 at Rhodia’s Oldbury plant.
There is no difference between white phosphorus and “yellow” phosphorus in terms of toxicity. They are one and the same.It is also a distraction technique to try to not link the issues of human heath and safety and the obvious bird deaths caused by the same chemicals. The breakdown chemicals from Albright and Wilson’s/Rhodia’s operations should not be used disingenuously to try to negate their linked environmental damage.
Fires in connection with this site appear to have been occurring throughout the disastrous period of dumping here and allowed to “burn themselves out”. The incidents also occurred when this site was under licence and still receiving waste far more recently than this- indeed a suspicious fire occurred when they removed barrels put on to allegedly stop birds landing on the pool with the sediment on them igniting, as did other licence breaches which I recorded at the time.
From Express and Star 13/1/2009
There certainly ARE conclusive links between the chemicals contained in the pool and the bird deaths– but no thanks to the Rhodia spin and deception trying to conceal this.
Subsequent to these conclusive links between the pool contents allowed to be dumped under licence, (and in no way this licence regulation stopping this from happening), Rhodia then suddenly announced that they were putting cctv cameras at the pool. This was of course in response to the fact that they knew that I would be recording any future issues and had already sent these videos to experts in the US who agreed with our conclusions.
The Health and Safety executive are shown on record in minutes I obtained via an FOI request about advising Rhodia about safety issues at the site, though when I asked them what advice they had given, they claimed that this comment had been erroneously minuted. Frankly I don’t believe this was the case.
The timing of this camera installation being installed AFTER the conclusive links between the birds being poisoned by the chemicals within this installation put there only by the site operators, I will leave people to draw their own conclusions.
Here’s a video of when they were chasing swans off the site using a motor boat.