Leak at Brill Place superlab would be catastrophic

Published: 9 September, 2010

• MANY unsafe laboratories fined – so how safe is a superlab?

As Somers Town residents learn of British research laboratories being fined for lax safety measures, they are amazed that the site proposed for UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation – Europe’s biggest biomedical research centre – is right beside Europe’s biggest transport terminal.

Plans for the superlab were submitted to Camden Council on September 1.

The proposed site had been zoned by Camden Council for housing and community facilities.

St Pancras and Somers Town Planning Action (SSPA) oppose the construction of the UKCMRI at Brill Place, opposite St Pancras station; 1,500 scientists and staff would work on “killer diseases” on a site of 3.6 acres. 

The Medical Research Centre is on a site 10 times larger, 36 acres, at Mill Hill.

But UKCMRI told a parliamentary select committee in 2007 that Mill Hill would be sold, along with the National Temperance Hospital, to help pay for the new centre costing £600million. 

This would leave UKCMRI with no large safe sites for experiments.

SSPA have learned of several laboratories being fined for lax safety, and wonder how many such cases have been unreported. 

The Press (north London) of July 10 2010 reported that the Health Protection Agency was fined £25,000 after exposing staff at its Colindale laboratory to a spillage of E.coli in October 2007. 

“Workers were exposed to a potentially deadly 0157 strain of E.coli when more than a million doses of the bug were leaked onto the floor from a trolley of hazardous waste.

Judge Martin Stephens QC (at the Old Bailey) said it was only by “good fortune” that staff were not harmed by the spill. The HPA was also ordered to pay £20,166 in costs.”

The Guardian of Tuesday April 22 2008 said it had found “over 70 dangerous incidents in labs and breaches of health and safety regulations aimed at controlling dangerous pathogens over the past 10 years”.

The Health and Safety Executive brought five prosecutions at universities, research institutes and labs attached to hospitals.

Imperial College London was prosecuted twice in 1996 and fined £45,000.

Other cases involved The University of Edinburgh (fined £3,500) and Birmingham university (£10,000).

The HSE has instigated three Crown censures in the past 10 years, allowing it to act against government establishments that are immune from prosecution under health and safety law, such as Porton Down and the Central Science Laboratory in York.

In the past five years, HSE issued at least 23 notices for laboratory breaches of regulations concerning substances hazardous to health, genetically modified organisms and health and safety; 42 investigations relating to diseases and dangerous occurrences in labs.

Dr Ellen Nisbett, a malaria researcher at Cambridge University said: “We are extremely well trained in what we do… But if an accident does happen, it could be catastrophic.

You just have to make sure it does not happen or locate the lab in an area where it is not so catastrophic if it does happen.” 

SSPA believe that an accident at Brill Place would be catastrophic.

The centre would be the equivalent of 13 storeys high, from which pathogens might escape despite a sophisticated building management system.

It will descend the equivalent of five storeys into the earth and into the water table through which an accidental escape of infection could spread into London’s, Britain’s and Europe’s rail systems. 

Contact stplanning action@gmail.com or call 07967417859. See stpanstplanningaction.wordpress.com

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