MORE than a hundred residents in Huncoat have vowed to fight plans to build a waste treatment centre in their village.

At a public meeting last night people voiced their concerns about Lancashire County Council's plans for the former Huncoat power station site.

They were told by local councillors and protest leaders that funding for the project was limited by time.

They were urged to do what they could to slow down the progress of the scheme, in the hope that funding would eventually fall through.

Coun Brendan Shiel said: "There is a time limit on this and if we can make it awkward for them, we might be able to stop it. We want Huncoat to get a fair deal."

Ian McCann, who is one of a small group of villagers to form a committee to fight the plans under the banner of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, said villagers had come together in the past to fight unwanted development and called on them to do the same again.

He said: "Ten years ago we fought at a public inquiry to stop this land being kept as an industrial site.

"We are prepared to take it to a public inquiry again. We have a village here that is worth preserving."

Committee chairman, Reid Lewis, of Burnley Lane, who received the letter from the county council about the proposals three weeks after he and his family moved to Huncoat, said the county council had not carried out an adequate survey of contamination on the former power station site, which has been empty for 15 years.

He also criticised the traffic survey, which he said would not represent the true levels of traffic because it was being conducted during the half-term holiday.

On a survey into the wildlife on the site, he said English Nature had been asked to produce it in just two weeks during the winter when many of the plant and animal species supposed to inhabit the site would be dormant.

The treatment centre, one of a number to be built across the county by 2010 as part of a £75million overhaul of rubbish collection, would take in waste from across East Lancashire.

It will use new biological treatments to break down rubbish which has not been seen as biodegradeable in the past and is seen as the way to bring dumping rubbish in the ground to an end.

A planning application for the plant, which the CPRE claim will be the size of two rugby pitches, and more than twice the height of an average house, has yet to be put forward by the county council.

At the meeting residents were asked to lodge their opposition to the scheme by writing to county hall when the plans were submitted.

They were also asked to attend the next meeting of Hyndburn Council's Huncoat Area Committee, at the school on Thursday, November 18, where the issue would be on the agenda.