Heavy stench hangs over the killing fields of Cumbria

By CAROLE CADWALLADR

GREAT ORTON - What would 7500 rotting sheep carcasses smell like? Nobody could guess, and when the moment came the international press corps, camped on a perimeter road around Great Orton airfield in Cumbria, struggled to find the correct adjectives.

"Putrescent, no?" wondered the French television journalist, sniffing the air tentatively. "Is this what you call putrescent?"

It was. A sick, thick, heavy smell that seemed to cling to clothes and hair even when the wind had shifted and sent it another way. Others tried great gulps, and regretted it. Even the drivers of the lorries have reportedly found it too much.

"One of them stopped my husband last night to ask him directions to the airfield," said Kathleen Hazell, a Great Orton resident. "And he was almost gagging."

Flanked by wind-stunted trees and the giant turbines of the neighbouring wind farm, criss-crossed by men in white contamination suits and buzzed by press helicopters, it looked as if the British Agriculture Ministry had made the right choice; the bleak, grey former airfield was as suitable a spot as any for the mass grave of half a million animals.

At 12.25 pm local time, half an hour or so before Chris Collier, the chief executive of the Cumbria Tourist Board, went on BBC radio to persuade the nation that the Lake District was still open for business, the first lorries were unsealed and the unloading of the carcasses began.

Leak-proof containers on lorries carried the carcasses under sealed tarpaulins to the site. Trenches were being built as needed. Carcasses were being dumped at one end of a trench while bulldozers still worked at the other. The dead sheep were drenched in lime and covered by mud.

According to Chris Gaskin, an Army spokesman, the project was proceeding successfully. Ten thousand more dead sheep would be brought to Great Orton today and 20,000 on Thursday. "And on the same day, we hope, although hope is probably not the right word, to start bringing in the live sheep."

As a metaphor of the failure of Britain's policy to deal with foot-and-mouth, a mass, rotting, fetid grave has already proved irresistible to the foreign press.

The tourist board has just £20,000 ($70,000), raised as a fighting fund by local businesses, to counteract the latest images of "Wordsworth's Lake District" that are being beamed around the world. "We need visitors now more than ever," Collier said. But with the prospect of the fell roads being closed, and kept off-limits for months to come, the national park will have to decide whether it really is open for business as it is insisting, or not. At stake are the 47,000 jobs that tourism sustains and the northern summer season.

The head of the Army operation in Cumbria, Brigadier Alex Birtwistle, said cattle could not be buried because of the BSE risk. "Sheep can be buried or burned, and we have about 70,000 sheep to pick up, and about 15,000 cattle we will have to dispose of."

Britain stopped burying cattle in 1992 for fear of spreading BSE, and the Ministry of Agriculture said the no-burial policy applied even if the disease was not suspected.

Birtwistle said the Army could bury up to half a million animals in the mass grave and was considering up to five further sites in England should the crisis worsen.

In Scotland, authorities have chosen a spot near Lockerbie in the south of the country as a burial site for more than 200,000 sheep carcasses.

Yesterday, as the number of cases rose to 634, the Government said it might reverse its policy and vaccinate livestock against the disease. "A few days ago even, this was regarded as anathema to very large parts of the farming community," Prime Minister Tony Blair said. "As you track the disease and see how it spreads, things that may have seemed unpalatable a short time ago have to be on the agenda."

- AGENCIES

Herald Online feature: Foot-and-mouth disaster

UK outbreak map

World organisation for animal health

UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food

The European Commission for the Control of Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Pig Health/Foot and Mouth feature

Virus databases online