In recent months, 18,000 tonnes of contaminated soil has filled much of Aalestrup and the rest of Vesthimmerlands Municipality. It is the amount of contaminated soil from the Nordic Waste disaster at Randers that has been transported to the soil hotel in Aalestrup.
When you look back at the photos from Randers from the beginning of the year, you can easily understand that the citizens of Aalestrup do not welcome the ton-heavy piles of soil with open arms.
And the insecurity has not been lessened by the fact that on Friday, on the basis of access to documents, Nordjyske was able to tell about the legacy of another bankrupt company: Approx. 180,000 tonnes of slightly contaminated soil – that is, ten times as much – which is located on the cadastre just behind the one where the Nordic Waste soil was dumped.
A few years ago Nordjuyske wrote about the reason, and there was talk of suspicious night and weekend drives of large loads with suspicious soil. “The Wild West” it was described as. Now it seems that the case was then somewhat forgotten, and the plans for clearing the land and establishing commercial plots, which are in short supply, have not materialised.
There are no signs that the ground hotel in Aalestrup has the potential to develop into a new Nordic Waste scandal. It’s a completely different scale. Still, there’s an inescapable sense of deja-vu as some of the same warning lights flash.
We have the group of concerned citizens who are trying to get the administration to take extra tests and ensure that everything is as it should be. That there are no surprises hidden in the ground.
We have the concerned city council member trying to focus on the contaminated land. In the Municipality of Vesthimmerland, it is Rasmus Vetter from SF who has tried to call out his colleagues for a number of years. Unsuccessfully.
– They say they have it under control, and of course I have to believe that. But I will not be surprised if you can find something that is very polluted on the site, he says today.
And as the final ingredient, we have the carefree supervisory authority, who, in the form of chairman of the technical and environmental committee Allan Ritter (K), is completely “comfortable” with the situation – and who does not believe that further tests are necessary to give peace of mind the stomach among the citizens of Aalestrup.
Add a bit of Randrusian backhandedness and it all sounds familiar.
Randers Municipality struggled for a long time with the aftermath of the landslide near the small town of Ølst, which set enormous amounts of soil in motion in mid-December last year.
Bo Amstrup/Ritzau Scanpix
When it comes to contaminated land, land hotels and trust in the business operators, all exhortations from regulatory authorities may sound a bit hollow when the wounds a few kilometers further south are still not healed.
And even though we are a society that is based on trust, it may be that the authorities, precisely in a case that draws threads to one of the biggest environmental disasters on Danish soil in recent times, would have to go the extra mile to create safety and transparency for the neighbors and the citizens of Vesthimmerlands Municipality.
Yes, there will be an additional cost to do further investigations of the contaminated soil.
Yes, the technicians do not expect that there is anything new under the sun.
And yes, we live in a trust-based society where we cannot comply with every demand from concerned citizens.
But when we talk about contaminated land in 2024 in Denmark, trust is good, but control is better. Especially if the control that can give the citizens of Aalestrup peace of mind is tests for a few thousand kroner.
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2024-03-24 05:02:04
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