March

It doesn’t matter how unblemished your previous incident record has been, or how well trained your staff are in site safety, it’s impossible to prevent the actions of deliberate mindless vandals.

The severity of environmental damage isn’t defined by the cause but by the actual pollutant released. Whether that is triggered by negligent worker, freak accident or deliberate sabotage is of no consequence to the aquatic victims or those charging to clean-up the spill. The only thing that businesses can do is to ensure that the outflow from their site has adequate automated containment to capture the pollutant material and prevent it getting into the local environment.

As the lead story below demonstrates all too graphically, the tentacles of a pollution incident are far reaching and impact local jobs, businesses and wildlife. The costs already related to this incident are in the hundreds of thousands of Pounds. The case has been referred to the Crown Court so the total financial cost is yet to be determined, however, the only certainty is that the vandals wont be the ones writing the cheques for the remediation costs or any subsequent compensation claims and fines!