Sorry, we made a nasty smell!

8:59am Saturday 10th May 2008

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BRITISH Sugar today apologised to residents after untreated water at its former York factory unleashed a foul stench.

People living near the plant in Boroughbridge Road - where demolition work started earlier this week - complained that the stink wafting around in the wind was like a mixture of manure and rotten eggs.

"It's absolutely awful," one resident told The Press.

He said that he had concerns there might be a potential risk to health.

Mick King, from Poppleton, who was waiting to pick up his child from Manor School, said he had noticed the very unpleasant odour.

"It was pretty bad yesterday," he said.

Environmental health chiefs at City of York Council launched an investigation after being alerted to the problem by The Press on Thursday, but later passed the matter on to the Environment Agency.

An agency spokeswoman said it had granted British Sugar an environmental protection regulations permit for the work to decommission the site.

Peter Stevenson, environmental management team leader, said: "We will be investigating whether British Sugar have breached their permit."

A British Sugar spokesman said it apologised for the smell that had been created, but stressed that no one's health had been put in jeopardy in any way.

He said the problem had arisen because, as part of the demolition process, control systems on site had been decommissioned.

This had led to the water treatment system failing to treat waste water from the plant which was stored in huge lagoons prior to discharge into the river.

He said that when the warm weather arrived this week, the untreated water had begun to give off an odour.

The spokesman said the problem had now been rectified.

"The plant is now running full steam and treating water up to river standard as normal, and we expect to clear the water in the next two weeks."

The smell problems would ease over the next few days as more and more of the water was treated, and there would be no more odours in future, once the lagoons had been completely emptied.

A spokeswoman for the Tangerine confectionery factory, formerly known as Monkhill Confectionery, which is situated near to the British Sugar plant, said that staff there had carried out extensive checks to ensure that it was not responsible for the smell.

The stink brought memories of 2006, when Acomb residents complained about a terrible stench which they said had made them feel sick and forced them to close their windows during hot weather. It emerged later that the problems were caused by ice cream waste being stored and spread on farmland at Rufforth, and an odour abatement notice was issued by the council.

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