Hedon Blog launches Petition against the Saltend Smells

THE HEDON BLOG has taken the unusual step of launching a petition to help galvanise local action against the foul odours, from Yorkshire Water's Waste Water Treatment Works. The persistent stink has been making local residents life almost unbearable during the whole of July 2011.

The Blog usually tries to take a neutral position on most matters, but on this occasion has felt compelled to act as a local mouthpiece. Ray Duffill the website Editor explains:

"The smells from the Saltend site have become unbearable during the last 5 weeks. Comments on the Blog, on Fix My Street and on Facebook have shown the disgust and revulsion of local residents. Anecdotal evidence from local people reveals that people have been physically sick from the stench, and local asthma sufferers have experienced breathing difficulties. While the area has basked in glorious sunshine and heat, residents have been forced to close windows and abandon their gardens because of the stink." 

Ray continued: "At the presentation about the waste water site I attended in May, Neil Dewis, Yorkshire Water's Manager of Central Control and Optimisation, apologised for his company's 'no-smell' claims made prior to the site being built in 2000. It was "obviously wrong of the company to have made those claims" stated Mr Dewis who then want on to explain that the new £3.5m odour control unit - which he hoped would be operational by November, rather than December as originally scheduled - would see a "significant reduction" in odours but he could "not give a guarantee" that odours would be completely eliminated."

"Whilst people living and working in the proximity of the site continue to experience the impacts and effects of the Treatment Works, they need some recourse to force Yorkshire Water to act to reduce incidents. The petition calls upon local councils to treat the odours as a 'statutory nuisance'. If a statutory nuisance exists in your area then legal action can be taken to force the 'polluter' to act. Failure to act can be a criminal offence."

"The Treatment Works do carry out an essential service. Local councillors, officials and community leaders are willing to work with Yorkshire Water to improve things - and have been doing so for 11 years. But at the moment local people and communities are powerless to act. However, if the smells from the site are deemed a statutory nuisance then we can start to fight back and force improvements!"

Residents are asked to sign and share the online petition on the Hedon Blog and reproduced below. *Note: Please do not sign if you have already signed a paper copy.

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The Hedon Local News Hub - The Concept

So I rang up my local swimming baths. I said 'Is that the local swimming baths?' He said 'It depends where you're calling from.' Comedian Tim Vine

'LOCAL NEWS' is something that matters or is of interest to you in your local area. What matters to you, depends on your perspective and community that you are active in at that particular time. We are all active in communities even if we don't think of it that way - we're active in communities as neighbours, as workers, as travellers and at leisure. And as our lives interact with these communities then 'local news' takes on a different relevance. If you're stuck in a traffic jam then the relevant and useful local news is that which will inform you of how long you will be stuck - and what you might do to get out of the jam.

So the term 'local news' really does depend on where you're calling from and in which particular 'community' you are active in at that particular time. This is important to clarify because 'local news' is something that a new project proposed for Hedon hopes to discuss in some detail.

Hyperlocal news-gathering websites like the Hedon Blog, the Paull Village Hall website and Beverley's HU17.net concentrate on our 'community of place' i.e. where we live. Their 'niche' is our street, neighbourhood, village or town and they strive to bring together everything useful about that place under one virtual roof. How well they do that is open for discussion. But the fact they exist and are increasingly becoming a source of internet based information for local residents within those places means that they are a factor that can not be ignored.

The people behind the growing number (hundreds!) of hyperlocal websites across the country are varied and have different motivations. Some are redundant or student journalists, others are community activists or groups with a sense of civic duty - but all share a passionate belief that reporting the local news and providing local information can play a useful part in improving our communities of place.

Hedon Blog founder and Editor, Ray Duffill (that's me!) hopes to build on the hyperlocal model by establishing a Hedon Local News Hub which will have definitive aims to build a 'local news' infrastructure that can lead to better informed, engaged, and active local communities in Hedon.

The Hedon Local News Hub would aim to be a constituted partnership body bringing together volunteers, local communities, voluntary groups, local business, training providers that can draw in funding to provide a dedicated news-gathering and news-sharing service in the town - and a network of community citizen-journalist reporters with access to training and technical support opportunities. This network would dig out and investigate local issues - hold local authorities to account and strengthen local democracy, and be a source of positive press around which community action could ferment.

The News Hub would research what the local news-needs of the Hedon community actually are and then plan to meet these while providing a community newswire service to link those with news to share with existing media organisations that can do this.

This is the first in a series of articles exploring this concept. If you would like to get involved, have advice or information to share, or otherwise wish to express an interest in this idea, then please e-mail hu12@gmx.com and put "News Hub" in the subject line. 

In writing this article I have been inspired by the Media Trust document Meeting the news needs of local communities (published on Scribd).

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