From Peter Double, chairman, Action for Wildlife.
THERE seemed to be very little if any comment when it was revealed in a recent Jersey Evening Post article that 118,000 tons of incinerator ash is stored annually at La Collette reclamation site.

If this amount of ash has been stored for, let’s say, eight years, that amounts to 944,000 tons of toxic waste. Just how much space does La Collette have? How much was stored prior to this eight-year calculated period, and what will be stored there for the next two to three years until the new incinerator is commissioned?

Having noted how the excavation at the Castle Quay site, behind the Radisson Hotel, floods each time there is a high spring tide in an area where we know loose incinerator ash was mixed with other inert land fill, how can we guarantee that the ash stored at La Collette is completely water-tight and will not be flooded during high spring tides?

Another recent news story suggests that the incinerator contractors do not know where the fly ash is stored. Had they known or had they been given the correct advice, I doubt they would have made front-page news by slicing into a fly ash storage pit.

I can only hope that Transport and Technical Services, and its preceding Public Works Department, have been working on an action plan to remove the stored waste or, Heaven forbid, is this its final resting-place, hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic waste yards away from an internationally recognised Ramsar site?

In my view La Collette reclamation site is becoming an environmental time bomb and unless there is a plan to remove all fly ash waste from the site permanently, the bomb must surely explode and cause irreparable damage to Jersey’s ‘Marine National Park’.
The Old Coach House,
Oxenford Close,
St Lawrence.