ACCORDING to more than one reliable source, members of the school authorities and many, many parents from all over Radcliffe are alarmed at the council proposal to locate the new Radcliffe Riverside "superschool" right alongside the Tower Farm and Ee's landfill site.

This new school will replace the old Radcliffe High and Coney Green schools and will accommodate hundreds of local children.

Having been in continual operation since 1969 until 1998, when current operators NSR Ltd began tipping inert material in order to create a park and golf course, the landfill site contains thousands of tons of organic and toxic waste, the decomposition of which produces methane and other noxious gases.

Because no appropriate regulations existed in 1969, there was no legal requirement to line the landfill site in order to prevent leakage, thus no butyl membrane was ever applied to the base of the site, as would be the requirement nowadays.

Furthermore, after several years of tipping, the operators, Wimpey and Beatwaste, vacated the site without having adequately capped it with the necessary topping of clay.

During the early 1990s, East Lancashire Paper Mill had plans to use the methane contained within the landfill site to power the mills machinery, but were unable to do so because, never having been capped adequately, the site was leaking in so many places that the methane could not be obtained from one point. Consequently, ELPM were obliged to have a natural gas piped in from the centre of Radcliffe in order to fuel their combined heat and power (CHP) plant.

This site has been described variously as "a toxic time-bomb waiting to go off" and "a major cause of ill-health in this area".

The council, by apparently not taking these factors into account, is rushing through plans which they could come to regret and that may well have serious consequences for our children.

VERY CONCERNED PARENTS