News
Newcastle Under Lyme Borough Council
Having been labelled the country’s smelliest village, Silverdale in Staffordshire has been attracting the attention of the local council and the Environment Agency (EA) for all the wrong reasons. Silverdale’s residents have inundated the local authorities with a deluge of complaints about the rotten egg smell emanating from Walleys Quarry, the local landfill site.
The offensive odour is in fact hydrogen sulphide (H₂S) and whilst it chiefly represents a nuisance to the local populace, at levels higher than the 8 parts per billion (ppb) concentration at which 50% of human beings can identify it, it can have debilitating medical effects such as headaches, itchy eyes and sore throats. A measure of the seriousness of the situation is a recent protest march by residents and several petitions being submitted to the government. It is now a major news story. Both the EA and Newcastle Under Lyme Borough Council are committed to alleviating the distress the landfill gas is causing the local community and it was decided that the best way forward was to monitor the levels of H2S pervading the local residences accurately and regularly. In order to effect this, the council contacted ABLE regarding the Jerome J605 Gold Film Hydrogen Sulphide Analyser which, since its launch, has become the recognised industry standard for water treatment, waste management companies and regulatory bodies such as the EA and SEPA. The Jerome’s specificity and single digit ppb low level detection capability makes it admirably suited to nuisance odour monitoring. Currently, around the clock monitoring is taking place in the vicinity of the landfill as the authorities attempt to gather a representative quantity of data, with a view to forcing the landfill operators to take curative action and future responsibility for odour monitoring. This may well take legal action to resolve but whatever the outcome, Newcastle Under Lyme Borough Council know that they can put their faith in the Jerome to deliver viable measurement data.