Mayor André Van De Vijver (Green) of Zwijndrecht pleaded not guilty in the PFAS committee, despite knowledge of the pollution since 2000.
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It was only in April 2021 that Steven Vervaet (Green), alderman of the Environment in Zwijndrecht, was aware that the inhabitants of his municipality were at risk from PFAS pollution. He stated this in the commission of inquiry, which started Monday with the political witnesses.
Vervaet’s statement was met with disbelief by MP Koen Daniëls (N-VA), who cited a series of events on the basis of which ‘the municipality should have known better’. “We didn’t know anything until the environmentalist (Thomas Goorden, red.) contacted us’, he paraphrased the ships. “The documents show other things.” For example, there was a soil remediation process in 2006 and various environmental councils from which the contamination by the forever chemicals pale. There was Wendy D’Hollander’s PhD at the University of Antwerp, who allegedly informed the municipality in writing of the extremely high concentrations of PFAS in chicken eggs in the vicinity of 3M. The city council says it has lost all trace of her correspondence. And then there was a site visit by the municipality to Oosterweel to inform themselves about PFAS.
Bart De Wever, mayor of Antwerp (N-VA), declared in June about this ‘evidence’ The Seventh Day that they were ‘crushing’. He repeats that statement today. ‘The time lapse of the file speaks volumes,’ says De Wever, who is expected in the investigation committee on Friday.
It is a ‘diversion manoeuvre’ from personal responsibility, Groen said, after there was no communication to the public in 2017 about the dangers of the substance. Van De Vijver, the only mayor who supplies greenery in Flanders, invoked the progressive insight from which the risk to health had to emerge: ‘There is a difference in not having been aware of the danger to public health, to have been aware of the pollution at the 3M site,” he says.
Waste company Ovam denied that there was a risk to public health.
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