... AND CHAOS FORCES 2,000 LORRIES TO PARK ON DISUSED RUNWAY
DOVER and surrounding villages were mired in chaos yesterday with thousands of lorries stuck for a third night as a result of the French travel ban.
While drivers despaired of getting home to their families for Christmas, local residents endured streets filled with trucks and littered with waste.
At disused Manston airport, near Ramsgate, more than 2,000 lorries sat on the runway, their drivers having just one toilet – and even that was blocked up.
Though sympathetic to the drivers’ plight, locals complained that many had parked on narrow residential streets, throwing out rubbish and leaving excrement.
The villages of Sellindge and Newingreen are both next to the M20, a major route for trucks coming from ports across the south of England.
Yesterday locals complained that vehicles were not just driving through but also parking on pavements. Stanley Bull, chairman of Sellindge Parish Council, said: ‘It’s all got progressively worse over the past 48 hours. There are eight or nine lorries parked up in the lay-by and they’ve been there since the weekend. We’ve just had human excrement cleaned up from there but I imagine it’ll be filthy again.’
In Newingreen, Peter and Sara Mulligan found a lorry parked outside their house. Mr Mulligan, 53, said: ‘It’s not nice at all. They are trying to cut the queues by getting down to Dover through the back roads. The house shakes every time one bombs past.’
Households in Athol Terrace, which sits under the white cliffs in Dover, have been forced to navigate roads full of traffic when they leave their street. Irina Grisajeva, 58, said: ‘Traffic is awful. At night the lorries are honking all night long and you cannot sleep.’
At Manston airport, which doubled up as a lorry park, one lorry driver Laszlo Baliga said there was ‘no water and no toilet now – there is one toilet, but it is now blocked’. The 51-year-old from London spent yesterday delivering food and water there after desperate pleas from Hungarian drivers on Facebook.
Phil Houlton, operations director at haulage firm DWP & Sons, said three staff had been stuck on the M20 for 14 hours – and were forced to dig a hole on the side of the road to use as a toilet. ‘I’m disgusted,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t treat dogs like this. Society forgets about truckers, they just care about their goods getting to wherever on time.’
Two Polish truckers who had dropped off medical respirators to help Britain’s fight against coronavirus now faced Christmas in their cabs.
Greg Mazurek, 36, and Simon Kopanearz, 30, have been stuck at Dover since 1pm on Monday.
Even if they do make it across the English Channel they still face a gruelling 15-hour journey home to their young families. Mr Mazurek said: ‘We have just made a very important delivery and this is how we are repaid.’