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SARP (UK) Ltd.
1.29 pm
Mr. Harry Barnes (North-East Derbyshire): There have been two major incidents of clouds of acid vapour escaping from SARP (UK) Ltd. at Killamarsh in my constituency. They presented considerable and serious dangers to the residents of Killamarsh and the surrounding built-up areas, including parts of the constituencies of my hon. Friends the Members for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) and for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts). The plant is situated close to housing and within a few hundred yards of a junior school. It is also on the border of the Rother Valley country park--I see my hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley in the Chamber--which is used by thousands of people.
The first incident occurred on 14 May. I explained the events in detail to the House in a speech on 20 May. I shall not repeat the points that I made then, not least because the case is being placed before the courts in a prosecution by the Environment Agency. However, I should like to place on record details of the second major incident and subsequent events before making some general comments. Although the matters that I shall refer to are under investigation by the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency, no official reports or prosecutions on them have yet seen the light of day. In the absence of such prosecutions, I am free to speak about the issues.
The second major incident took place on 30 May. I visited the site soon after, and met local residents. I have not been able to inform the House of the second incident until now, having been out of parliamentary action from 4 June because of a stroke. Apart from the short recall of Parliament following the tragedy at Omagh, the House has not met for 12 weeks.
However, I raised the issue through early-day motion 1385 on 3 June, and presented a petition to the House on 24 July on behalf of 7,000 residents in north-east Derbyshire, Killamarsh, Rother Valley and Sheffield, Attercliffe--my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe is also in his place. I should like to mention on the record the help that I obtained from my agent Bob Harper and other Labour party members in the Killamarsh area during my illness and subsequently.
The SARP plant at Killamarsh is a chemical reclamation plant. At its acid-alkali treatment plant, there were four storage tanks surrounded by a concrete bund near the base. On 30 May, one of the tanks collapsed, with two thirds of its sides immediately disintegrating. The tank contained nine tonnes of liquids, 26 per cent. of the contents being nitric acid.
As the liquid, including considerable amounts of acid, fell into the bund, a huge orange cloud of acid vapour rose and escaped. The atmospheric conditions were poor and the acid cloud moved back to the site and its vicinity before slowly dispersing. Firefighters who went to tackle the toxic spill were initially refused entry to the plant on the grounds that the matter was under control, even though the plant's fire hose, which had been found to be defective on 14 May, had not been put right by 30 May.
That second major incident, just 16 days after the first escape of acid vapour from a tanker, had a dramatic impact on officialdom, the local communities and SARP.
The authorities--the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency--set up investigations into that further major incident, and embarked on a full audit of all the processes at the plant.
The reaction of the communities in Killamarsh and surrounding areas was dramatic. Everyone had had enough, and demanded the removal of the plant to a site away from areas of population. A residents committee was formed, known as RASP--an anagram of SARP that stands for Residents Against SARP Pollution. It has persistently campaigned for the closure of the plant in dramatic style, including a visit to SARP's parent company, Vivendi in Paris--a multinational that is embarrassed because it likes to portray itself as environmentally friendly.
The parish council, the district council, the local county councillor Alan Charles and the three Members of Parliament have all made vigorous representations to my right hon. Friend Minister for the Environment. We are all thankful to my right hon. Friend for visiting SARP and meeting representatives of RASP and the councils in Killamarsh on 29 July. However, the determination of the residents did not come out of the blue. It has built up over a long period, which included an explosion at the site in 1986, when the plant was run by Leigh Environmentals.
I took a deputation to meet the Minister for small firms, Mr. David Trippier, even though I was not a Member of Parliament at the time. That deputation was made up of local councillors and representatives of KRAC--the Killamarsh Residents Action Committee. I placed details of those and further serious matters before the House when I became a Member of Parliament, most notably in an Adjournment debate on 28 February 1990. There had been the additional possibility of the infamous Karen B being brought to this country, with materials from it being likely to go to the Killamarsh site.
Astonishingly, although SARP has been under constant supervision by the Killamarsh community since the second incident, it has failed to get its act together. A catalogue of incidents has been unearthed. On the day of my right hon. Friend's visit to Killamarsh, it was discovered that barrels of rocket fuel were stored close to the local junior school. My right hon. Friend will remember his visit to the school playing field, with the SARP site starkly nearby.
The consignment of rocket fuel came in 1,507 drums in 20 deliveries between 1993 and 1995. Of those, 184 were left to deteriorate and had to be stored under water. Some of the remaining drums were incinerated, while others remain in storage on the site. I know that my right hon. Friend is concerned about the matter, which is under investigation by the Environment Agency, as are another five incidents.
First, waste was left on the ground, with serious smells affecting the community, when an old storage tank was being cleaned out. Secondly, substantial off site odours were caused following leachate recycling. Thirdly, 20 tonnes of slurry were dumped on a landfill site. There are questions as to how that met the provisions of the waste disposal licence. Fourthly, the recirculation of effluent in storage tanks caused serious smells. Fifthly, a gas scrubber was not properly maintained, leading to a further inability to remove smells from waste.
There have been numerous other incidents, such as the sample bottles of aniline carried from Killamarsh to Teesside by TNT that leaked en route. The material is
hazardous, and causes skin and eye irritation. TNT was not informed of the contents of the bottles. Past carbon monoxide releases from the incinerator have also been found not to have complied with the licence. Then a tanker started to leave the site, although a worker was still on top of it.
In addition to the responses of officialdom and the community, and because of them, SARP has had to react. It closed down the six chemical reclamation processes at the plant following the incident on 30 May. Although the company attempted to restart the secondary liquid fuel plant within 48 hours, it backed off when I objected to the Health and Safety Executive. On 18 June, however, as I was leaving hospital, the process was reopened--not least because it accounts for 48 per cent. of SARP's turnover on the site. The other processes have remained closed down--20 weeks after the tank collapsed.
SARP has announced its intention to transfer its acid plant, oil plant and transport depot from Killamarsh, while reducing the number of drums on site, including the rocket fuel. It claimed to me that that will involve the end of emissions into sewers, which have caused major unrest in the area for years. I welcome SARP's belated recognition that too many processes operate on the site, and appreciate that employees need to be fully consulted about transfer arrangements, as they will affect half the 110 jobs on the site.
SARP's proposals still leave us with the secondary fuel plant in operation, and would involve the reopening of the incinerator and the solvent recovery plant. We are awaiting the outcome of the reports of the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency, including the audit of the plant. Those could lead to SARP having to remove more, or even all, of the operations from Killamarsh. I am therefore keen that the official reports into incidents should be completed as soon as possible and put into the public domain. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to respond specifically to that point.
I am also concerned about whether highly critical reports of SARP will be enough to prompt the authorities to take action to close down SARP's remaining processes. A House of Commons Library briefing tells me that, under part 1 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990,
"local authorities are statutorily obliged to include conditions in any authorisations they issue which are designed to ensure that the process is operated under the Best Available Techniques Not Entailing Excessive Cost . . . to prevent and minimise emissions of prescribed substances and to render harmless any substance that may be emitted . . . local authorities can issue enforcement, variation, prohibition and revocation notices to ensure that appropriate standards of control are met, and raised in line with new techniques and new awareness of environmental risk. Prohibition notices are a mechanism for stopping a process if there is an imminent risk of serious pollution of the environment."
Will fresh legislation be needed to strengthen such provisions so that the experiences of the long-suffering residents of Killamarsh may come to shape legislation that will have a wider application in protection against industrial pollution?
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