The level of fine particles generated by the fire of a waste recycling center in the department for ten days “has significant impact on the population”, prevents the atmosud organism.
Le Monde with AFP
The alert threshold is widely exceeded. Air pollution generated by the fire of a waste recycling center in the Bouches-du-Rhône for ten days “has important benefits on the population”, According to the Air Monitoring Organization Atmosud . “One can make a comparison with Beijing when the pollution peaks are the most intense,” said Dominique Robin, director of the association.
From Monday to Tuesday, the level of fine particles PM10 in the air around the site of the recycling company in Saint-Chamas, municipality of about 8 000 inhabitants on the banks of the Etang de Berre, to Fifty kilometers from Marseille, exceeded 140 μg / m 3 (when the alert threshold is 80) over twenty-four hours, depending on the measurements of Atmosud.
The Mayor of Saint-Chamas, Didier Khelfa, asked Tuesday to the school principals to prohibit the exit in the recreation of students and closed the external sports centers and the children’s games of his commune “as a precautionary measure ” He hopes to lift these steps quickly, “thanks to the mistral that has to happen,” he said.
A complaint envisaged
For ten days, the inhabitants of Saint-Chamas and the surroundings suffer the consequences of this fire that mobilized sixty firefighters. In particular, they reported on December 27, olfactory nuisance to the authorities. Tuesday, the fire was mastered but, “given the volume of waste that continues to burn,” still released important fumes, explained the mayor.
“The conditions and the volume of storage of the site are not in accordance”, according to the prefecture, which had taken a decree of formal notice twelve days earlier to demand that the company returns to a lower level of 1 000 m 3 stored before the end of the year.
“there, we are at 20,000, 30,000 m 3 of waste!”, Khelfa, who had alerted the authorities as of April, seeing “waste stocks which accumulated dangerously “. “How could we be derived at this point this company, in defiance of fire risks?”, Questioned the mayor of Saint-Chamas, who plans to complain, alongside France Nature Nature Environment ( FNE), Federation of Nature and Environmental Defense Associations.
Tuesday, at a crisis meeting, the various actors examined the strategy to continue to overcome this polluting fire. “It is necessary to walnut and evacuate the waste, but the operator is absent subscribers and it’s a huge cost,” says Khelfa. According to him, “the legislator really needs to supervise this type of business that can set up anywhere on a simple statement on the Internet”.
The company, Recycling Concept 13, that the France-Presse Agency tried to contact Tuesday, was not reachable. This fire is “revealing a much wider problem”, according to Richard Hardouin, of FNE 13, which denounces “a parallel economic system, because there is no sorting sector worthy of the name”.