The decision intervenes, while the confinement work of the 42,000 tonnes of toxic waste threatening the Rhine water table were about to begin.
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New rebound in an almost twenty-year file: The Nancy Administrative Court has just lifted an obstacle to the extraction of the 42,000 tonnes of chromium, cyanide, arsenic, asbestos, and other waste Toxic to Wittelsheim (Haut-Rhin), in the Stocamine Galleries, canceling a prefectural decree of March 23, 2017, which allowed their storage “for an unlimited duration”. For the supporters of their withdrawal, there was urgency: after completing, this summer, the preparatory work for the confinement of the site, his operator, the MDPA company, was, indeed, to sink the first cubic meters of concrete constituent concrete Future dams. It is now obliged to suspend its work.
Opened in February 1999, the Stocamine Flood Center used the old galleries of a potash mine, located more than 500 meters deep, to store hazardous and toxic wastes. Originally designed as a reversible solution, the site only worked for three years until a fire challenges its operation. Since, residents, associations and elected officials fight for buried waste to rise to the surface. Several studies have, in fact, revealed a risk of flooding of the galleries and rise of polluted water in contact with the Rhenic water table, considered as the largest drinking water reserve in Europe. About 95% of mercurial waste has been evacuated between 2014 and 2017, but, following this, the company MDPA, a subsidiary of the site responsible for the operation of the site, had been granted an authorization to storage of the remaining waste, with the confinement measures of the site subsequently rendering any impossible access.
The public not sufficiently informed
It is this authorization that the Department of Haut-Rhin, then the European Community of Alsace, the Grand East Region, as well as the Alsace Nature Environmental Defense Association, challenged before the administrative jurisdiction. An operation of the last chance for the supporters of a waste evacuation, while the Minister of the ecological transition, Barbara Pompilili, confirmed, in January 2020, the decision taken by his predecessor of their definitive landfill. The Nancy Administrative Court finally estimates that the MDPA, liquidation company since 2009, does not have the technical and especially financial capacity to carry out the project and to assume all the requirements, in particular the monitoring of the Long-term site and the possibility of intervening in case of need. It also notes that the public has not been sufficiently informed of the new storage conditions after the 2002 fire.
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