Letter from: local resident (name withheld)
To: Sharon Thompson, Head of Planning Control, Kent County Council
Subject: APPLICATION: SH/08/124 - Anaerobic Digestion Plant, Otterpool Lane
Thank you for your letter notifying us of the above planning application, however we can’t help wondering if this is not just a paper exercise your department is doing because it would appear that the owners of the proposed Recycling Plant seem to have employed contractors to clear the land and prepare it for construction. From that one can only assume that they are pretty confident that they will get the `Go Ahead’ sooner or later.
However we would still like to lodge our three main objections to this proposal which are `Smell’, `Transport’ and `Speed’. Before my recent retirement I worked as a Plant Engineer for chemical companies in Silver Town. London and Willow Lane, Mitcham. Both plants were forever being visited by the Environmental Dept. because no matter how good or modern their equipment they could not stop nasty smells escaping from the plant causing distress to the local population. It will happen here also because this plant is being sited too close to the village of Sellindge. This sort of plant really needs to be sited in an area already blighted by similar factories.
On the subject of Transport we have heard that a large number of Lorries will be needed to bring in the waste material and an equally large number to remove it once treated. We all know that the Lorries traveling from the west side of the plant will leave the motorway at junction 10 and travel through the village. A village which already suffers from a considerable traffic flow. We have heard that some Transport companies on the Lympne Industrial Estate had Planning Conditions imposed on them by the Planning Office to direct their drivers to leave the M20 from junction 11; if this is true then they (the companies) and the council are certainly not enforcing it. Therefore any similar conditions that you may apply to this application should it succeed, will go unnoticed.
With elderly people crossing to the doctors surgery and children crossing to the village school speed has always been a problem and a worry for the local population, a road that is fairly straight and therefore tempting for drivers to proceed down it at a faster speed than legally allowed and with the likely large increase in heavy lorry traffic it may be only a matter of time before we have a serious accident here. Even without the extra lorries, we need right now, some form of traffic calming measures built into this road, such as road islands or chicanes to help resolve this problem. (As at Capel-le-Ferne which is also an A-class road suffering from operation Stack).
Yours Sincerely
