Residents pay to clear up dump site
DESPERATE Bahçeli residents and bar owners have stumped up 8,000TL to clear an illegal dump site on the Bahçeli-Küçük Erenköy main road after four months of complaints to authorities yielded no results.
The roadside plot of land, the size of a football pitch, became an unofficial tip in June as building rubble, furniture, oil drums, used nappies and bags of domestic rubbish piled up.
A nearby villa owner said: “This is a disgrace. Rubbish has built up and spilled into the road and we have had a growing problem with rats and foxes.”
Evergreen Developments Tatlısu representative Paul Farmer said: “We contributed 1,500TL towards the cost of removing this eyesore over three days using heavy equipment. We have thanked local resident Brian Hills in our current residents newsletter for all his efforts to coordinate the clean-up.”
Mr Hills said: “We have cordoned the land off and put boulders there to deter vehicle access.”
He added that he had sent numerous emails to the Environmental Protection Department (EPD) and the Interior Ministry and had complained to the police, but “no-one wants to know”.
A spokesman for Esentepe Municipality said: “The EPD and the police want us to identify flytippers so that they can fine them but we don’t have the personnel to keep watch. The owner of the land is in Turkey.”
However local residents who preferred to remain anonymous said municipality workers had themselves been seen dumping on the land and that previous municipal clean-ups had merely bulldozed building rubble over the edge of the land.
Esentepe Mayor Cemal Erdoğan was out of the country and could not be reached on Thursday.