Danger Dust

“Shame on you!” roared the crowd outside the RCT council offices in Pontypridd. “Stop the quarry! Whose mountain? Our mountain!”

The blue stone at Craig yr Hesg is 70% quartz, ie silica. Which makes its chippings used for road building highly skid resistant.

Silica dust – proven to cause cancer – falls from the sky. Yet, the council says the high rates of asthma, COPD and cancer are anecdotal.

Greed

Kids in Glyncoch are breathing silica dust to make a nice road surface. What an indictment of capitalist greed and indifference!

The Labour council has allowed multinational Heidelberg to rip out the mountain for years. In 2014, it sold 27 acres for an extension for £4,000 – and mineral rights for £2.2 million. But when the Labour-led Senedd granted a further extension last year, people in Glyncoch organised to fight back.

Houses in Glyncoch shake like there’s an earthquake, every time a blast comes. They shake when the massive lorries pound by.

The blasts terrify the kids. The quarry is now only 164 metres from the school. In Germany – home of Heidelberg HQ – legally, the distance would be 1,000 metres.