Residents whose lives have been blighted for seven years by a 40ft high mountain of rubbish are celebrating after it was finally removed.
The 27,000-tonne mountain in St Paul’s Cray, south east London, was built-up by a firm who intended to burn the waste for renewable energy.
The company which had leased the site, Waste4Fuel, abandoned it after losing a High Court battle with the Environment Agency, leaving the huge pile of rubbish looming over nearby residents’ homes and causing the area to stink of ‘rotting corpses’.
The stop-start plan to shift the waste was then delayed after contaminated waste was discovered.
The site is estimated to have cost the taxpayer nearly £5million to sort out, with the fire brigade being called to the site more than 200 times.
A huge mountain of rubbish behind homes in south east London has finally been removed by workers this week
The mountain of rubbish was built up by a firm who planned to burn it for energy, but was abandoned after a legal dispute
The site was cleared this month, with residents celebrating the end of a site which had caused them heartache for years
After final work to remove it started this summer, the last pieces of waste were finally removed this month.
Resident Jan Watkins, 60, who lives 100 yards from the site, said: ‘I’m extremely pleased it’s finally gone. We’re all very relieved.
‘We’ve had a lot of big problems – the awful smells, the almost weekly fires, the traffic. When the fires were burning we would often lose our water pressure and some people even lost their heating.
‘The flies and rats were a big problem, and even though I have cats they kept bringing corpses in the house. The waste’s removal will definitely improve the area and push up the house prices.
‘The work was meant to finish in March but it’s really dragged on and on.’
Residents had to live with the mountain of rotting waste near their homes, bringing in swarms of rats and flies
It has taken years to finally organise the removal of the rubbish at huge cost to the public purse. Pictured: The site this week
Dennis Clark, 67, added: ‘I was stuck in limbo, and if I’d wanted to sell my house, I wouldn’t have been able to.
‘But now I have the opportunity if I want to and it’s a lot nicer here now, I can have my windows open.
‘I’m a bit concerned because they haven’t decided what to do with the land, but I don’t mind as long as it’s not big flats.’
The huge mountain weighed the same as 2,100 double decker buses, or almost half as much as the Titanic.
As well as blight on the local area, the rubbish would often catch fire, leading to endless calls to the local fire service
Annette Rose, a campaigner for Bromley Friends of the Earth, has been working with residents for five years to have the rubbish removed and is ‘thrilled’ the work is finally complete.
She said: ‘We’ve worked for five or more years on this on behalf of residents, who had a horrendous time with fires and the disturbances at the site.
‘The smell has been terrible, they’ve been forced to keep their windows shut because of the smoke from the fires, and there has been a rodent problem.
‘They’ve had a really awful time of it so we’re absolutely thrilled that it’s gone – it’s such good news.’
Bromley Council said the waste has been processed in Kent and will now be recycled across the country according to the type of material.