The roads around Hoad’s Wood are typically quiet, used mainly by residents of the nearby villages and hamlets west of Ashford, Kent. So when trucks began rolling in last summer and dumping lorry loads of waste into the ancient woodland, it did not escape the notice of Yasmin and John, who are in their 70s and own around 36 acres of the site.
As a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) it is a criminal offence to cause environmental damage, so the couple expected swift action when they alerted the authorities.
Instead they watched as, over the next six months, lorries made hundreds of journeys into the site. “Every half hour we would see one going, one coming back,” says Yasmin. “We warned everyone we could think of.”
You must log in or register to comment.
“But these are fully laden, 32-ton trucks driving in twos and threes down the lane, from seven in the morning until 5pm, at probably a minimum of 30 loads a day. To gather enough evidence is going to take a day, maybe a week. It was left to go on for five or six months.”
That’s what I don’t get - it should have been possible to figure out where the trucks were coming from and shut this down within a week. I presume the individuals at the relevant agencies care so it must be due to a lack of funding even for something so blatant.
If you’ve ever seen industrial flytipping, you’ll realise how profitable it is and what levels a flytipper will go to. I’ve seen rented warehouses filled with this shredded mix of mung.
This makes me absolutely furious.
