'I feel like we’re being experimented on' - child’s powerful plea against Cemex quarry for Hamble airfield

The first week of April marked the start of the Hamble quarry appeal logged by Cemex after the Hampshire County Council refused its application to extract 250,000 tons of sand and gravel a year at Hamble Airfield.

On the first day of the public inquiry, in a u-turn, Hampshire County Council said it would not defend its position and was “content” to allow the appeal after all three reasons for refusal were overcome.

Residents told the planning inspector why their village is not an appropriate place for a quarry.

A secondary school student from Hamble School, Isabelle Bidwell, aged 11, bravely spoke at the meeting, expressing that what upset her the most was that Cemex did not capture the site’s biodiversity.

She said: “I’ve seen owls hunting there at dusk. I’ve heard woodpeckers and watched butterflies and deer. I know there are bats, smooth nudes, hedgehogs and slow worms. They are treated like footnotes in their reports.”

She said that her house is less than 100 metres from the proposed site, and if approved, that would mean that she will be breathing in dust at school and home “every single day”.

Miss Bidwell added: “Nobody knows exactly what the quarry would do to us. Nobody knows if it will affect our health in 10 or 20 years. That makes me feel like we’re being experimented on, like our future doesn’t matter as much as sand and grave. We are the ones that will have to live with the consequences long after the machines are gone.”

Sign up for free emails when you visit The News’ newsletter page here

Dr Mark Thompson, senior partner at Blackthorn Health Centre for 34 years, reported that the community has 2,500 patients with respiratory conditions, 3,400 with heart diseases, and 1,500 with mental health challenges.

“We’ve been asked to accept a 10- to 15-year operation that will raise levels of nitrogen oxides. We already live in an area that is identified as having poor air quality. The quarry will increase dangerous particles, especially pm10 and pm2.5; these are tiny and invisible to the naked eye and small enough to enter the human system and lung alveoli, where the oxygen exchanges take place.

“These particles are proven to trigger asthma, COPD and impair lung development in children.”

Dr Thompson urged the inspector to reject the appeal and said that the future health of the Hamble residents “must be prioritised”.

“We cannot, in good conscience, stand by silently while a development endangers our community’s physical and mental well-being.”

Rober Hillman, a Hamble resident and a statistical modelling expert specialising in chaos theory – a branch of mathematics used to explain phenomena like weather patterns and traffic dynamics – said Cemex failed to represent the impact of traffic in their assessments and came to an “erroneous conclusion” in their eye transport assessment.

“This is a classic example of how remote desktop analysis, in this case, someone looking at an Excel spreadsheet, can misinterpret the facts.”

He added that not only did Cemex “jump” to the erroneous conclusion, but so did Hampshire highways, which is “really odd”.

“An objective worst-case impact assessment would apply the development traffic during times when congestion is building.”

He accused Cemex of “playing down” the results and blamed assessment models when “it suits”, “is bad practice”, he said, “a well-known trick known, attempted to bias the assessment towards the client”.

See the latest new developments for Portsmouth, Fareham, Gosport and Havant

“Cemex has never established a sensible baseline from which to assess impacts […] This is why there’s such a gulf between the residents and the business and the Cemex claims of negligibility. That’s why there’s so much passion and anger. Cemex has not even remotely come close to measuring the impact of the development on a worst-case basis.”

Cemex previously said it was “confident the site can be operated without any significant adverse effects”.

The hearings will continue on Friday, April 4, when the leader of Eastleigh Borough Council, Keith House and police and crime commissioner Donna Jones are expected to speak against the Cemex proposal.