The problem was and remains that until a colossal cleanup is completed, the entire development is effectively worthless.
Safety rules dictate that at the very least the top two metres of earth across the entire 4,500 acres needs to be removed, for instance. More must be dug out if toxic surprises are found.
Those costs are estimated to be almost half a billion pounds, according to a valuation report seen by The Telegraph. Surveyors therefore ascribed the site a notional £1 value.
The costs of cleaning it up are larger than the use value once it is cleaned up.
Therefore, don’t clean it up.
Some things really are this simple
4,500 acres of industrial land should be worth more than the £500m cost of cleaning it up, especially if occupiers will get tax breaks. Also, if it is going to be used for industrial purposes, it might not necessarily need such extensive remediation.
It is not really clear from the article exactly what level of obligation lies on the developers and on the public sector. I doubt there is any corruption involved but it wouldn’t be the first time the public sector signed a contract not in its best interest…
Who’s safety rules? Jacques Chirac? Helmut Kohl? Angela Merkel? Ursula von Der Leyen?
Mud dredged from a river is toxic waste according to the clowns who used to run this country but are now limited to fucking up the European mainland (unless you include going to the ‘G7’ and stirring up trouble in strange sounding places with far away names). We can decide what is ‘safe’ these days.**
** I know, I know, it’ll be decided by British cunts, but at least they’re British cunts…..
I wonder how much it would cost to develop a machine that dug up the top 6′ of dirt, cleaned it, moved along and chucked the clean dirt out the back?
Less than half a billion quid?
I suppose it would depend if the reason for demanding cleanup was to facilitate or to prevent development. If the latter, then another billion quid of reasons would be easily found.
The best approach would be to get the government and/or the council to pay for the clean-up, then flog off the land toxic-dirt cheap to your mates.
Hold on. The land is purportedly valuable because of its proximity to the Redcar Bulk Terminal. Then we read about “a deal meant to keep the Redcar Bulk Terminal out of bankruptcy” so we now have two layers of economic madness. We read on to find “land was then allocated to the site’s first tenant … which planned to build a turbine blade plant” so here’s third layer of subsidy-farming.
And – while admitting that I might have skimmed the piece too quickly – I don’t understand why “Safety rules dictate that at the very least the top two metres of earth across the entire 4,500 acres needs to be removed”: why must that be done for the entire site? Why not just for any bits that are potentially valuable because of location, location, location? Or at the other extreme, why not for the whole of Great Britain? Why is this 4500 acres to be treated as an indivisible quantum of land distinct from all other?
The only error appears to have been to spend public money on the place. If someone was prepared to give it a go, good luck to them.
But I understand old sites like Stonehenge and the Roman roads are no longer considered toxic. So if you wait long enough, no one’ll give a damn if a steel works was there a thousand or so years ago.
“I don’t understand why “Safety rules dictate that at the very least the top two metres of earth across the entire 4,500 acres needs to be removed”: why must that be done for the entire site? Why not just for any bits that are potentially valuable because of location, location, location? Or at the other extreme, why not for the whole of Great Britain? Why is this 4500 acres to be treated as an indivisible quantum of land distinct from all other?”
Because there are lots of people whose jobs depend on such sites being considered ‘contaminated’ (the Environment Agency, waste disposal companies, owners of tips licenced to take contaminated waste soil etc etc), and the last think they want is someone coming along with a solution that doesn’t involve them having their noses in the trough.
I do admire the mixing of metric m³ with Imperial acres to make the assessment of the 500m VFM as difficult as possible.
Dearieme,
They probably don’t need to take out the top 2m. Haven’t read the article, so don’t know what they are putting there (turbine blade plant? so industrial use?) and what the contamination is, but the concept of leaving the nasty stuff where it is and encapsulating / putting capping layers over the top is actually becoming the preferred solution in a lot of cases. Digging out polluted soil does not solve the problem, it just relocates it (to somewhere that it is hopefully less of a problem).
Bloke in Wales – that’s sort of what they did at the Olympic site in London. They had a ‘soil hospital’, that cleaned up the soil they were digging out so that they could put it back. It was effective and clever engineering, but not cheap. And again, the stuff they clean out of the soil doesn’t disappear, it just get relocated (possibly as fumes in the air, or less volume of more heavily contaminated soil or groundwater)
I used to work in a Uni lab where from time to time there would be construction work undertaken in the basement. What always – always, I tell you – turned up were (i) lots of mercury, and (ii) radioactive muck.
I have an impression that the main way of dealing with them was to deny them the oxygen of publicity. Know wot I mean?
Gonna be fun when someone reveals that the RN ran a reactor at Greenwich for decades right?
Oh my Tim. Still, radioactivity is one of those things that really reduces with time. So ‘do nothing’ is an excellent solution.
TW and Bb – so, should I talk about the reactor in Sunningdale, Berkshire? (For those of you who don’t know the area, quite a few of the current and ex Royal family live in the neighbourhood – Windsor is fairly close.) The RCS (not Surgeons, a different, old, London institution) joke was that the radiation made the fish in the pool very large …
Charles. The insistence on demolishing the reactors and clearing the sites makes it quite plain that the small modular reactors that could provide the plentiful, reliable, non-CO2 emitting energy that the Greens claim to support won’t happen any time soon.