On August 10, 2003, HLC's waste facility near Swansea suffered a fire in its composting area, which took fire fighters four days to put out (see letsrecycle.com story). During this time over a million litres of water was used to put out the fire and became polluted by the burning material and waste on the site.
HLC has received two notices from the Environment Agency regarding the escape of water from the fire at the 32 million facility.
A statement from the Environment Agency in Wales said: “Contaminated fire water was produced as the burning material and waste stored on site was doused with water. To prevent pollution, this firewater should have been contained on site as required by HLC’s Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) Permit. This did not happen and some contaminated water entered the sea at Crymlyn Beach and the Agency is concerned that HLC did not take responsibility for protecting the environment during the incident.”
The statement continued: “The Notices require that HLC have provisions in place to contain firewater in the event of a fire on-site and that they set up procedures to ensure that the Agency is informed of such incidents in the future as is required by the Operator’s PPC permit. HLC will not be allowed to take any further waste until they have complied with the Agency’s requirements.”
An investigation is under way by the Environment Agency into the cause of the fire as well as HLC’s management of the incident. The Agency has said that further action may be taken against the Portuguese waste company.
An Agency spokesperson said: “We are looking at the causes of the fire and the HLC response to the fire very carefully and will have no hesitation in taking further enforcement action if appropriate. In the meantime we wanted to ensure that as a priority HLC address our concerns regarding the threat posed to the environment if such an incident was to occur again.”
HLC were unavailable for comment.
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