BUND | AllThingsGerman.net: Oberursel

Dealing with the problem in the Eppsteiner Straße

“An accusation has been made, unlike anything the town’s administration has ever been accused of before” was how Dr. Eggert Wintert (SPD) commented on the claims by the BUND (the German branch of “Friends of the Earth”) that the removal of toxic waste from a piece of ground in the Eppsteiner Straße had caused health problems for one family who had run a shop there.

He quoted from the dossier, commenting on the fact that setting free toxic gases can carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

But he also made clear that to make such claims, BUND must be able to prove them and take responsibility for the consequences of making them, concluding that the way the dossier had been distributed by e-mail and social media that it had been designed to cause a scandal. [Read more…]

The toxic problem in the Eppsteiner Strasse

For the past week, one of the main topics of discussion in Oberursel has centered around a small piece of land in the Eppsteiner Straße, hidden away behind houses 11 and 13.

The land, which has been owned by the town itself since the 1970s, was once home to a company that cleaned out barrels there. Whatever they did, it apparently resulted in the ground being contaminated with a cocktail of chemicals, collectively known as “lightly volatile halogenated hydrocarbons”, abbreviated in German as LHKWs.

This all lay undiscovered until 2002, when tests were being carried out in the area to find a new water supply. On finding contaminated water, the problem was traced back to the Eppsteiner Straße and this very same piece of land. [Read more…]