THE government is moving to close one of the darkest chapters in the island’s environmental history, by commissioning what it hopes will be the definitive study of the Ascarel dump at Kato Polemidia, Limassol.
Thirteen years after hundreds of tonnes of earth contaminated with the highly toxic PCB chemicals known as Ascarel were dumped in a sealed pit in the Limassol suburb, the Agriculture Ministry has announced that a team of Swedish experts has been brought in to assess the risk to man and the environment.
Environmentalists and local residents have long protested about the dangers posed by the Ascarel dump, despite the precautions taken when the poisoned earth was entombed in early 1988. Kato Polemidia is a cancer hot spot, and some have claimed this could be linked to the presence of the dump of carcinogenic PCBs in the area.
The pressure from greens and local residents would now appear to have paid off.
“The Geological Survey department of the Agriculture Ministry announces that it is pressing ahead with conducting a study to re-examine and assess the methodology and citing for the Ascarel dumping site at Kato Polemidia,” an official statement read on Tuesday,
Swedish consultants SWECO have been brought in to carry out a two-year study, and a team of experts came over for a first site visit earlier this month.
The Ascarel arrived on the island inside massive electrical transformers imported from France by a scrap metal firm in 1987. Workers at the Limassol scrap yard, apparently unaware of the poisonous nature of the polychlorinated bi-phenyl (PCB) waste, removed 20 barrels of Ascarel from the transformers and dumped it in a nearby abandoned quarry pit.
When the authorities got wind of what the scrap merchants had done, they intervened and recovered about 900 tonnes of contaminated earth from the quarry. “It would have cost a huge amount of money to take the tonnes of earth to Belgium, where the waste could be incinerated, so it was decided to make a special pit at Polemidia instead,” George Sideras, the Labour Ministry’s pollution expert said yesterday.
The pit for the Ascarel was carefully sealed with concrete and a plastic lining, but fears about possible leaks into surrounding soil and groundwater persist. Bore holes were sunk in the area around the PCB dump, to allow monitoring of any leachate from the entombed earth.
The Swedish team now re-examining the dump will be sinking fresh bore holes both within the dump and around it.
Sideras noted that PCBs are particularly insidious toxins because they are not biodegradable but instead persist in the environment “for thousands of years”, accumulating in the fatty tissue of any creature unlucky enough to ingest them. PCBs have been linked to cancer, liver damage and suppression of the immune system.
The irony of the Ascarel saga is that the scrap merchants who originally imported the environmental headache into the island have not had to pay a penny in compensation, as the law did not contain any anti-PCB provisions in 1987. The cost of removing the PCB contaminated waste from its original dumping site in a disused quarry and redepositing it at Kato Polemidia is estimated at around £300,000.
Since the 1987 disaster, the government has set up a special chemical treatment plant at Vasiliko for neutralising PCBs.
SWECO’s remit includes recommending a way of re-treating the Polemidia Ascarel waste if the ageing dump is found to be an unsafe solution.
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