£750K to get rid of asbestos and La Collette...and counting

Wednesday 02 November 2016

Three-quarters of a million pounds has been spent on clearing La Collette waste plant of dangerous asbestos – but that bill will go up and up.

A total of £750,000 has been spent on sealing asbestos underneath the La Collette site, but as more of the deadly substance is found, more will have to be spent on making the area safe.

Infrastructure Minister Eddie Noel says it has been money well spent as the States have no option but to do the work.

He said: “We are talking about moving and burying the asbestos. It is currently temporarily stored in shipping containers, which was always ever going to be a temporary solution, but we are now starting to bury the asbestos in specially constructed cells in the ground, at the site. They are sealed in bags, put into pits and buried. There is a lot of coverage before we cap off the pits and the area is made safe.”

The Infrastructure Minister said strenuous efforts were made to try and move the asbestos to sites in the UK mainland.

He said: “If you were in the UK you could maybe use a disused salt mine. We tried to export the asbestos into the UK. We heard that asbestos in Cyprus was moved to the UK and put into a disused salt mine, but we discovered that it came from an MOD site, so they got special dispensation because it was effectively coming from UK land to UK land.

“We applied for a licence to ship it off to the UK to be buried in a disused salt mine but we were refused that licence. We have a solution on the Island and that’s what we have decided to do. We had no choice about it because we cannot leave it lying there in containers.”

The asbestos will be buried at the start of 2017, but that will not be the end of the problem.

The Minister said: “We will be fighting this for decades yet, as the asbestos comes out the buildings at La Collette. It is an on-going thing. We will probably fill the first cell quite quickly because we have been having to store it for many years, since we first started taking asbestos out of the buildings.”  

Plans are afoot to try and open up parts of the La Collette site to the public.

Deputy Noel said: “We are looking into that because at the moment there is quite restricted access, but there is a corridor between the sea and the main plant. We don’t want to do that while moving asbestos, for obvious reasons.

“There is a section between the plant and Harve des Pas that we hope to open up shortly.”