London 2012 blog

Engaging with your critics is sometimes a difficult thing to do. As a former resident of the Clays Lane estate who had been 'decanted' or, as I prefer to say, evicted to make way for the Olympics I had been emailing the ODA and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) for some time with questions about the Eastway Cycle Track, a large area of open space next to my former home where I used to enjoy walking but which is contaminated with industrial pollutants and even some radioactive material and is now being remediated prior to construction of sports facilities.

I can't say I had been entirely happy with the responses. The ODA invited me to meet Lawrence Waterman, in charge of health and safety for the ODA, Richard Jackson, the ODA's environment manager and Giorgia Sharpe, community relations manager to discuss my concerns.

One question I had asked was what testing was being done to analyse the content of the dust coming off the site. When living at Clays Lane residents and travellers had experienced at first hand the impact of dust from Stratford City, where all the subsoil from the Channel Tunnel was deposited, and from the neighbouring Park Village estate, when the ODA demolished the low rise housing. As the Eastway has been described by the ODA as 'heavily contaminated' I was concerned dust from the site could be harmful for workers, closest to the action, and residents living around the site and was keen to know more about what measures were in place to analyse and control dust emissions.

Following our email discussion about the content of the dust the ODA decided to upgrade their monitoring to what the HSE described as an 'exemplary' standard. My visit included a tour of their on-site laboratory where most of the samples are analysed although some have to be sent to an off-site lab. I don’t pretend to be a technical person but the staff did their best to explain the testing processes and accommodate my tendency to go off at a tangent.

I can't say that the four of us reached agreement on the Olympics or the necessity of digging up a site like the Eastway, but we did make a fair stab at trying to understand our respective positions. Plainly it is impossible to eliminate dust from work sites, let alone one as large as this, so the key issue is how to limit the risks and mitigate the nuisance.
 
The ODA emphasised their objective of recycling material on site, a goal I would certainly endorse. Local people have every interest in keeping construction traffic to the minimum. My principal purpose was to urge the use of appropriate sprays, or other methods, to control dust. The ODA were keen to reassure me that they had learnt from the experiences of travellers and residents at Clays Lane and that they were committed to the highest standards in managing the site. I was promised further information on the controls in use at which point the meeting ended. So, to coin a phrase, it’s good to listen.