ESG Radio Newsletter Thursday 30th September 2010

Our last fantastic Clean up seems like such a long time ago now!! What a great effort by so many of you supporting an inspiring and active effort at giving something back to our environment. You may be surprised to know that a few teams want to do more areas soon! It’s very rewarding to transform areas trashed by the thoughtless especially when these areas should be home to nature’s creatures and with this years CUTW theme being Communities Caring for Nature, what better way than focusing our efforts in this way.

It’s fairly well known now that the Gib Government is responding to our campaign and has pledged to maintain over 30 such green areas from now on- we are obviously delighted about this.

It still remains a big issue for many of us though that our community should be educated to not littering and dumping in the first place and our campaign focus will seek to tackle the problem more at the source than simply cleaning up each year.

Watch out for more news soon on how we intend to go about it.

Other environmental news, well as always, there’s quite a lot going on. With a possible new management authority for our Upper Rock Nature Reserve, to possible expansion of bunkering on the Eastside, issues for the ESG keep cropping up – such as the dropping of the judicial review by Clifftop residents against the proposed new Power Station- this created additional delays to an already critically needed facility – and so good news the legal challenge has been stopped but the ESG regrets the delays and the manner in which Clifftop residents managed to delay the project and then get their legal costs covered by the taxpayer as well as assurances from Govt that noise levels etc. would be controlled.
As we have said in our press release today, to the many thousands of local residents severely affected by the pollution from our aging and illegal stations, this offers little solace. We urge Govt to simply move ahead and

prioritise the new power station now.

One important word on bunkering fumes- the ESG has managed to acquire a 24hr contact number to be called by anyone suffering from what is suspected to be a bunkering fume issue- we urge people to use the number as the port has repeatedly told us that their follow up is only as good as their being able to investigate the problem at the time it is occurring- the number to call is : 56000545 repeat-