In the article Mepa Orders Stop To Fuel Loading In Marsa (April 29), the firm Mediterranean Offshore Bunkering Co. Ltd is accused of polluting the environment.
Some of its activities have been stopped by the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, requesting the management to rectify the situation and instal the required mitigation measures, in view of the potential environment risks and nuisance caused by odours generated by some of the activities that this company carries out.
Such stoppage of activities must surely be a major economical blow for this company. This is a case about which Mepa would surely be called to be consistent in its decisions, and to use the same measures for similar weights.
For the last nine years I have been protesting continually to seven authorities, including Mepa, that the owners of a particular dairy farm situated within a development zone, surrounded by apartments, villas and a school, 50 metres away from a public road, were permitted not only to extend the accommodation for additional cows but also to modify the layout of the dairy farm on modern lines to obtain a very substantial grant from the EU, by which process, ironically, they have created a source of pollution to the environment. Far worse than what it was, when the farm was in its original primitive form and size.
The odours and stench plaguing the zone, plus the fly infestation migrating from the farm into the inhabited area, are a serious hazard to the public, as much as, if not worse than the pollution allegedly caused by the recycling of used fuel at Marsa, alongside Mepa’s Hexagon House.
The current situations of the dairy farm and the used fuel recycling plant have much common ground. Both establishments are situated in the heart of inhabited development zones; both carry a building permit; the dairy farm is definitely proved to be a cause of pollution, while the recycling plant is probably alleged to be so; public complaints abound, about both establishments.
In this scenario Mepa has taken the draconian step of stopping the activities at the Marsa recycling plant, but as far as I am aware, nobody has done anything to address the cause of pollution at the dairy farm; if mitigation measures have been taken thereat, they are certainly not adequate.
Moreover, I have never been informed what measures have been attempted to mitigate the cause of pollution. Why such discrimination!?
Is it because Mepa has got part of its offices a few metres away from the recycling plant at Marsa, and the dairy farm is miles away from its offices?
It is in cases like the aforesaid, where public health in general is seriously affected, that Mepa should manifest professional consistency in enforcing policies, and not in unsubstantial small matters hardly affecting anybody, as when its insists with house owners to move a wall a few centimetres so as to comply with statutory laws, regardless of the fact that the building might he planned on a very restricted footprint.