The first stage of this process is a “petition” to the council, requesting them to take the action which they could (and should) have taken ages ago to stop this intolerable nuisance. When they fail to do this, the way is then open for judicial review; this will look carefully at all the council’s actions or failures to act, and at whether the law has been broken.

Many of you have signed the petition already, but we know many other people in the outlying villages have not yet been visited by our clipboard teams. If you feel as strongly about this nuisance as most people and wish to sign the petition, you could save us time by emailing us your name and address so that someone can visit you to collect your signature. If you wish to assist by collecting signatures in your village, please get in touch and we will supply you with the appropriate material.

Why should we let our homes be damaged just for private business profit? Why should we put up with proven systematic lying from our council? Together we can stop this!

Please email your name and address to  petition@blastlincoln.co.uk  if you wish to add your signature!

This is what you will be signing:

TO THE WEST LINDSEY DISTRICT COUNCIL

In the matter of the former RAF  Faldingworth   -   Nuisance by noise.

Section 80 Environmental Protection Act 1990.

We, the undersigned whose names and addresses are entered below, and whose residences are situated in the neighbourhood of the former RAF base Faldingworth have since the year 2006 suffered and are still suffering undue interference with our personal comfort/amenity and enjoyment of our residences and damage to the fabric of our respective properties as the result of the ongoing activities at the Faldingworth site carried out by Richard Briggs, his servants or agents and the various Companies in which he is a Director, including Faldingworth Defence Ltd, caused principally by controlled explosions both in the open air and underground of explosive material on the site by them. 

We require you to:

1.     Forthwith re-investigate the present use of the site by the owner and occupiers and find that a nuisance exists and it is damaging to health, and 

2.    Having found that such nuisance exists to cause an abatement notice to be served upon the said Richard Briggs, his servants and agents, and all other persons and companies using the site for such purposes.

In the event of your refusing to carry out your statutory duties in this respect we reserve the right to apply for judicial review of your failure to take prompt action to abate the nuisance. 

Many of you will remember a public meeting in Faldingworth village hall, when a fresh-faced young chap from Atkins Ltd stood up and told us that our homes “could not possibly” be being damaged by the many massive explosions at Faldingworth. This argument has been trotted out by the council many times since then, whenever someone complains that their house now has cracks that didn’t exist before the explosions: “Atkins have proved it can’t be happening” says the council, repeatedly.

Many people have probably been put off from making insurance claims because of this. Possibly insurance claims have failed because of this. There is serious money involved.

So if it was discovered that the way the reports were done was manipulated in advance, and that they were not good, fair, honest, genuine science, that would be quite important, wouldn’t it?

Real scientists, when measuring things, go to a lot of trouble to make sure that they themselves have not unconsciously influenced the result. This is known as “double blind” testing; the point is to make sure that nobody knows in advance what the outcome is supposed to be, so they can’t accidentally skew the result. Real scientists also try to measure a lot of whatever they’re measuring, to make sure their result isn’t just a lucky accident.

A bad scientist, on the other hand, only measures a small number of things and doesn’t go to any trouble to stop the results being skewed in advance.

We used a Freedom of Information request to ask just what, exactly, Atkins Ltd had been asked to measure.

It turns out that Atkins only measured three explosions for noise, and only one of these for ground-borne vibration (it’s mainly the ground-borne vibration that cracks-up houses, of course). That’s too small a number to give a reliable result. It isn’t good science.

Worse, Atkins said in advance exactly which day they’d be measuring on. That makes it possible for the people making the explosions to keep them quieter that day. This is very bad science. But it gets still worse.

Atkins Ltd had a quiet chat with the council, and it was agreed that Faldingworth would be asked “which of their explosions was the most representative”, so that Atkins could measure only those [see letter below]. This is astonishing. And it’s much worse than just “bad science”.

The company mainly making the nuisance explosions at Faldingworth is a company called Ordnance Test Solutions, based in Northumberland but renting facilities at Faldingworth. On their website (www.otslimited.co.uk) they claim to do the following:

explosive ordnance disposal                proofing of guns and gun components
sample firing of ammunition (quality control)             gas gun manufacture
ammunition breakdown and “demilitatisation”                   ammunition repair
bonfire trials of munition packaging           safety testing of explosive products
assessment of service life of experimental products             safety drop testing
electronic firing systems manufacture and proofing               ballistics testing
fuel fire testing                   “slow cook-off” ammunition testing               etc etc.

A lot of this boils down to disposal of old stock (blowing up old bombs, shells etc), and quality control testing of armaments (to make sure they’ll kill the number of people they’re supposed to kill). On their website, Ordnance Test Solutions claim that a lot of this stuff is done underground or underwater. Underground explosions don’t make much noise; but they can produce huge amounts of vibration. These are the vibrations that can damage houses.

Atkins Ltd measured none of the underground explosions. Not one. Everything they measured was an air-burst explosion (and only three of those). They avoided measuring any house-damaging underground explosions at all. Purely because Faldingworth was carefully allowed in advance to choose which of their explosions was “the most representative”.

This was agreed between the three groups involved: Atkins Ltd, West Lindsey Council, and Faldingworth. Every single person involved must have known that this was not just bad science, but a stitch-up. Everyone involved must have known it would give a false impression that a reputable scientific company had conducted real scientific tests and had “proved” that no damage could be occurring, when the measurement context was in fact scientific nonsense and a complete sham from the outset.

This is not just bad science. This is manipulation, and very possibly fraud.

We cannot imagine how any reputable scientific company could act like this. We cannot imagine why our council, paid with our money to protect our interests, should connive with this. We can understand very well, however, why the Faldingworth business operation should be very happy to go along with it all. There’s big money in armaments.

West Lindsey will no longer discuss Faldingworth at all. Why would that be, do you think?

If any of you has had difficulty making an insurance claim for damage to your home which you think is due to activities at Faldingworth, make sure your insurance company sees this piece   -   particularly the extract below. We’re happy to supply the full document.

***********************************************************

From:  Atkins Scope of Works 17-3-08, p3:

[Part of a letter from Atkins to West Lindsey, confirming what they expect to be sent. Notice they’re still mentioning “Skydock”; they haven’t even bothered to work out which company is actually doing all this]

4. RECEIVABLES

The following receivables are requested as part of this work.

1). An agreed list of measurement locations.

2). An agreed selection of future ordnance tests that may be deemed representative of the current and future testing programme. This is likely to require further liaison with Skydock regarding what constitutes a representative test.

Well we don’t have that evidence, so we must use something else. We’re being asked to take the story on trust. Maybe we should use “trustfulness of character” as an indicator?  Here is a story from two years ago:

Back in the days when we imagined that West Lindsey council was giving us accurate warnings of when to expect explosions (and before we discovered this arrangement was “voluntary”, ie non-existent), there came one day without any warning a very large explosion. Someone rang the council to complain. According to WLDC, a council employee then rang up the Faldingworth site, and was told this was a “special” piece of work done at short notice “for the station commander at Scampton”.

We didn’t find this plausible; what would the Red Arrows need blowing up in a hurry? So someone wrote to the station commander at Scampton to check. The station commander courteously sent the following reply:

You will observe that Wing Commander Stylianides is unusually thorough, and goes out of his way to cover all possible loopholes. We can therefore take it that the story was a complete lie.

Trustfulness of character, anyone?