![]() A crime that no one, seemingly, wants to prosecute. The only way to understand the ordeal he is living through today is to revisit events then, as they reveal one of the biggest environmental crimes ever to have occurred in the U.K. Into the midst of this political and social turmoil arrived the 24-year-old Gowan, who in 1967 took up the post of Assistant Parliamentary Secretary at the National Farmers Union. Simultaneously they were addressing the increasingly evident problem of environmental pollution caused by industry, which led to The Control of Pollution Act 1974, to protect air and water. Both the Labour and the Tory governments struggled to reconcile the demise of traditional industries with the promise of the white heat of technology, of which PCBs were an integral part. Businesses and unions were involved in an increasingly acrimonious showdown. The answer lies in events that unfolded over a seven-year period between 19, as the ‘summer of love began to morph into the ‘winter of discontent’. The question that has to be asked is: why? Yet the Environment Agency and its consultants, world-renowned environmental engineers, Atkins, are refusing to consider it. Gowan swore his affidavit on behalf of farmers in the area, having spent six years investigating the pollution of the quarries, initially on behalf of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and latterly as an expert pollution consultant retained by the NFU and instructed by Geldards, now one of the country’s leading regional firms of solicitors. ![]() His evidence is compelling and is contained in his contemporaneous sworn affidavit to the District Registry of the High Court in Cardiff and his report into pollution at the site. He’d first gone there in 1967, two years after it had become a landfill site primarily taking chemical wastes from the nearby Monsanto chemical plant in Newport. Gowan knows more than most about this quarry. He typed in ‘Brofiscin’, the name of a quarry in the Taff region of South Wales, and came across an appeal from the Environment Agency for people with historical knowledge of the quarry to come forward. His life seemed increasingly rewarding until late in 2005 when he took a trip down memory lane via an internet search engine. THE WITNESS QUARRY DOOR SERIESHere was a place he had purposefully identified as somewhere he could receive medical help while indulging his passion for classical music – and, indeed, he launched a series of classical concert seasons that have been a resounding success. Then, having decided to settle in a small village outside Norwich, it has become anything but the idyll he had hoped it would. First he had a bad accident that left him disabled, and which has now led to another connection with Monsanto – high levels of PCBs have been found in his body tissues. It’s certainly not the retirement Gowan planned when he returned to England from the USA in 1999. If his evidence continues to be ignored, Monsanto could escape its liability for dumping thousands of tonnes of highly toxic wastes when they knew that this material posed a long-term lethal threat to public health and the environment. His misfortune is to be the sole surviving eyewitness who is prepared to speak out about Monsanto’s cavalier disposal of a number of highly toxic chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), in at least two Welsh quarries in the late Sixties and early Seventies. ![]() Palpably Gowan knows something that someone, somewhere, wants suppressed. ![]() Consequently, at the turn of April his protection officers began to talk of placing him under witness protection. Since volunteering his evidence to the Environment Agency in early 2006 this retired corporate finance director has been subject to death threats, threatening callers to his door and numerous attempted break- ins. But that is the position 64-year-old Douglas Gowan finds himself in, having spent the past six months living under police protection. Witness protection schemes are normally the preserve of supergrasses or The Sopranos, not people who volunteer evidence in response to a public appeal from a government agency. But like the periodic explosions that issue from the depth of the quarry, the truth has a way of blowing up in our faces. Documents have been mysteriously lost, witnesses silenced, scientific data ignored. ![]() For 40 years the story of Brofiscin Quarry – now the most polluted place in the UK – has been suppressed. ![]()
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