We remember the suspicious conflagration of this waste warehouse which had caused more than three weeks of air pollution. If the flames have since been mastered, pollution continues to spread. In any case, this is what a collective of citizens gathered in ” Cistude ”, a local environment for the environment.
More than three years ago, on December 26, 2021, the town of Saint-Chamas was the victim of a fire which had ravaged a huge hangar where illegally stored 30,000 cubic meters of waste. At the time, the operator had however only been authorized to store a volume 30 times less.
Consequently, a huge cloud of toxic smoke which polluted the atmosphere for 47 days with fallout from particles, of which have not yet been identified by the environment and the health of the population. But above all, 12,500 tonnes of waste is still stagnating today on the site.
The collective Cistudeenvironmental association member of France Nature Environnement 13 And born in Saint-Chamas, denounces uninterrupted pollution for more than three years, to see it we went there with two of its members, Christian Marquis, co-president, and Jean-Luc Plato, activist.
What strikes first is the ease of access, there is no need to climb barriers and no prohibition to penetrate visible. On the vestiges of buildings, young Urbex lovers came to sign their passage of giant and aesthetic grafs, the only human traces still pleasant to the eye.
Other touches of colors, magnificent poppies and their cousins, the glaucian whose yellow, also radiant, comes to break the ambient greyness. Sign that nature resumes its rights? Admittedly, but Christian Marquis shower quickly our hopes of resurrection: these two flowers which belong to the same family of papavirates have the ability to push in the most disturbed environments such as industrial sites and resist pollution without problem. A beauty that freezes you, especially since animals come to feed on other plants present as oats that one would think of a fertile and healthy soil.
What Cistude denounces is in four points:
– First the lack of transparency.
Since the fire, the association stresses having to fight legally – in particular by initiating procedure from the administrative court – with a view to obtaining information from the DREAL. Information that she considers, however, being entitled under the environment code.
(DREAL is a decentralized state service in the regions and in particular in charge of ecological transition.)
– She then denounced the absence, for three years, of health follow -up to people who live or work in the vicinity of the site.
– She also requests that a new study is launched concerning the dangerousness of waste, the last dating back to 2022 and therefore not taking into account the evolution of the situation.
And in particular taking into account the toxicity linked to eternal pollutants (treacherous substances and polyfluoroalkylas) whose presence it suspects and which were not sought at the time. Pollutants found in flame delayers and anti-fire foam which the firefighters are abundantly used to fight the flames.
– Finally, the 4th point, Christian Marquis sums it up in three words and an imperative: “Get out the waste!”
Because if the Dreal has long considered that tons of waste had no danger because inert, it is not the same for Ademe.
Following an appeal of Cistude With the administrative court, this agency, a public establishment in charge of the ecological transition, also recognized the existence of a level of “intermediate dangerousness” but without making more details either.
We therefore face a cocktail of different pollutants worked by heat, rain, wind and by time, which possibly affects the atmosphere, soils, basements as well as people who live or work in the surroundings and who generate a toxic flora from which local fauna comes, especially birds.
A polluted site supervised to the north by the La Touloubre river which flows just 200 meters further before throwing itself into the Etang de Berre, and to the south by the Creusets Communal Park, located on the other side of the D 15, the road to Lançon, which runs along the site.
On video, The “walk” in the site in the middle of an edifying setting with the explanations of Christian Marquis, co -president of Cistudea collective environmentalist born in Saint-Chamas but which brings together members from the whole periphery of the Berre pond.
