The Truth is Out There

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OK - I wrote last year about issues with the water safety at the Nantlle quarries, caused by industrial waste dumping over the many years since the quarry's closure as a going concern. I was very guarded in my approach to the issue for a number of reasons, but in the light of the recent BBC TV toxic dumping exposé "Buried", hosted by Michael Sheen recently, I have to add to that previous post the rider that I accidentally had sight of a report commissioned in the late-1980s about the Twll Balast site above the Dorothea Quarry, where technical scuba and mixed-gas diving is popular, and where a significant number of fatal accidents have occurred over the last few decades.

In that report - the copy I made sadly is no longer with me - it was stated categorically that the waters that have filled the Twll Balast workings since the quarry's demise are polluted with an extremely noxious cocktail of substances related principally but not solely to local plastics manufacturing during the decades following the closure of the workings, and a time when the dumping of waste was I'm pretty sure from memory, a council policy. The stuff dumped included toxic substances such as heavy metal compounds of lead and/or cadmium, and a variety of toxic solvents, most notably benzene: highly toxic and a carcinogen to boot.

When we first visited the Nantlle quarries in the 1980s, the surface of the water at Twll Balast was afloat with hundreds of metal and plastic barrels in various states of decay, belching noxious substances into the water, a fact widely attested to by the local population of Nantlle; but referred to only in later reports as 'merely anecdotal' and therefore unsubstantiated evidence of pollution. Believe me, the place was literally a chemical tip: the council may have since removed the obvious flotsam in the interim, but that's the total extent of their idea of a 'clean-up'.

The site has been up for sale to various organisations consistently over the last few decades: initially, the original report scuppering all attempts at completion of any sale, with the potential buyers realising that the clean-up costs would be frankly astronomical, if indeed the task were to be technically feasible in the first place. As I quoted in the first piece, the second survey of the early nineties - commissioned at such a low cost so as to be a complete and risible waste of time - appeared to be an attempt at whitewashing the whole affair. But the underlying issues - potential and immediate - were still alluded to by the language that the council used in the subsequent news briefings.

Much was made of the 'new' survey's approach of simply looking at the quality of the water in Afon Llyfni, the river feeding the community of Nantlle itself, but for £10,000, even then, how in depth a survey are you going to get?  The issue that wasn't tackled however, was the pollution of the lake that fills Dorothea, where so many leisure sports are performed; most particularly, scuba diving; the focus of the issue, given the number of fatalities that have occurred there over the last fifty years, and which continue to happen on a regular basis. I need to find a copy of that original report: its methodology was meticulous and its conclusions absolutely damning. As a matter of public safety and with some urgency, I need to surface this document and make it public. I'm working on it...

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