Villagers in despair over landfill site stench
BBCVillagers within sniffing distance of a landfill site in Derbyshire have said a "sickening smell" and a plague of flies has left them trapped in their homes.
People living just metres from the Erin tip in Duckmanton, near Chesterfield, said their complaints about the site had been ignored for more than a decade with recent hot weather making the situation unbearable.
Residents living nearby said they were being "terrorised" by the smells and pests emanating from the site this summer.
Valencia Waste, owner of the landfill, which opened in the former colliery in 1999, apologised for the odour and said the issues had been caused by a wait for approval to use a new section of the site.
Veronique Pickard, who bought her first home near the site with wife Amy a year ago, has to set out traps for the clouds of flies which visit her home from the tip.
She said she had seen waste piling up from her bedroom window. She added: "It was over the house, like from our bedroom we could see rubbish.
"It's gross, it's disgusting. It gets to your throat, makes you gag, you cannot stay out, you don't want to be there."
Amy said: "[The flies] go for everything. If you try to swat them away like normal flies, they won't go. They come, they come back.
"We're being terrorised in our own home. There's so much health things that I'm worried about now. If we stay here, what is it going to look like in 10 years?"
The site was scheduled to operate until 2021 but secured permission to continue operating until 2036.
Tiffany Jarvis, of North Grove, has lived next to the landfill for 22 years but said in recent years, the nuisance from the smell had become intolerable.
She said: "It's just violent on the nose, sore throat because of it constantly. It's a rubbishy rotting vegetation, rotting meat.
"Every morning waking up literally feeling sick, massive headaches because the smell is just atrocious."
She said she was fed-up with fighting the landfill on her doorstep.
"Nobody wants to buy this home so now I'm trapped. I'm trapped in a cesspool of a village," she added.
"It does make me want to cry. I've wasted my life fighting this battle and I'm just done with it now.
"It's like the villagers have suffered so many years, we've battled and because we're such a tiny little community we don't get anywhere."
Valencia Waste told the BBC rubbish had been mounting up because it was waiting for approval to start tipping it into a new section.
The firm apologised for the inconvenience that the odour was causing and said it had closed the site to waste deliveries and had been increasing soil capping to reduce odours.
It expects all waste will be tipped and covered "in the coming days".
The Environment Agency said it was inspecting the site daily and would take enforcement action if improvements were not made.
Chesterfield MP Toby Perkins said: "Ultimately the powers are there for the Environment Agency to shut the site down and to remove the licence.
"We will be putting pressure on the Environment Agency to make sure that Valencia get their act together and stop being such an intolerable neighbour to residents in Duckmanton and Poolsbrook."
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