The Hindu 25.07.2009
Waste disposal begins as Lalur residents relent
Staff Reporter
| Garbage piled up across the city will be cleared by Saturday: Deputy Mayor |
— PHOTO: K.K. Najeeb 
Vexed issue: Sanitation workers remove garbage from Chembottil Lane in Thrissur on Friday.
Thrissur: Garbage disposal in the city resumed on Friday, after a gap of 10 days, as residents of Lalur, where the Thrissur Corporation’s garbage yard is located, relented in their fight against dumping waste in their midst.
Lalur residents protested and opposed the dumping of wastes when the stinking waste water and leachate seeped into their houses and contaminated water sources. The contaminated water bodies around the trenching ground posed health hazard to the 40-odd families in the neighbourhoods.
An emergency meeting of the Lalur Malineekarana Virudha Samara Samithy on Friday morning decided to call off the opposition as the corporation considered their demands favourably and initiated steps to solve the problem.
“We are temporarily withdrawing our protest considering the hardships faced by people in the city,” said T.K. Vasu, chairman of the Samithy. What the corporation had done now was just a temporary measure and serious studies and discussions should be carried on to find a permanent solution, he pointed out.
Deputy Mayor M. Vijayan said that the garbage piled up across the city would be cleared by Saturday. “The corporation’s sanitation workers and Kudumbasree units are working fulltime to clear the waste,” he said.
District Collector V.K. Baby had on Wednesday given direction to the Secretary of the Thrissur Corporation to safely dispose stagnant waste water at the Lalur trenching ground and nearby areas within three days.
A technical team comprising Director of the Clean Kerala Mission Ajaykumar Varma and Environmental Engineer of the Kerala State Pollution Control Board T. Chitra Kumari studied the problems in Lalur and recommended immediate measures to ensure public health and safety.
“A concrete protection wall has been built inside the compound wall of the dump yard to prevent the seeping of waste waster from the dumped waste. Trenches are dug up to collect the waste water,” the Deputy Mayor said.
Meanwhile, health officials have warned of a possibility of epidemic outbreak in the city, considering the amount of pollution that the garbage piled up for the last 10 days had brought to water bodies.
“The health department has a hard task ahead,” District Medical Officer V. Divakaran said.
The corporation had been accused of ignoring the warning of the Health Department about the impending threat due to the unscientifically dumped waste at Lalur, especially during monsoon.
Even though the corporation was instructed by the Kerala State Pollution Control Board for urgent preventive and remedial action, the instructions were not fully complied with, a report of the technical team pointed out.
The Collector had asked the Kerala Sustainable Urban Development Project Manager to issue legal notice to Ramky Enviro Engineers, Hyderabad, for delaying implementation of Engineered Land Fill (ELF) at Lalur dump yard.
Timely implementation of the ELF would have avoided the present situation, he said. The ELF project was supposed to be completed in September but had not started yet. The Collector said that delay was a serious contract violation by the company.
