The black dust saga is bad enough in the sense that it has long evolved into an ongoing nightmare that will simply not go away. But what is even worse is that, apart from the fact that the way it has been handled has merely served to tarnish Mepa’s tattered credibility further, it has also served to reinforce the inexplicable sense of denial with which this regulatory body has approached the issue over the years – rather than weeks or months.

Given that the government has been committed publicly since 1999 to resolve the whole problem, it is nothing short of pathetic that it took the report of a Professor Vella last year for Mepa to suddenly smell the coffee and wake up to something that was common knowledge in most circles – political, environmental, etc.

Given that Mepa’s chairman Austin Walker has an executive role which he was meant to relinquish but to which he still clings as part of a never-ending transition process in devolving his powers to the not so ‘new’ any longer CEO, the mind boggles when recalling that Mr Walker had lamented last year that attempts had been made from June 2009 to November 2010 to find enough black dust to be able to study it.

So how come Prof. Vella has managed to do so in such a comparatively shorter period of time, at a much later date?

Even the Mepa delay in publishing Prof. Vella’s report and making it available to the Parliamentary Committee members sucked.

Dismissively blaming it all on the by now stock-in-trade reply that this was due to “administrative delays”, does not hold water any more.

At one stage, the government even blamed such a delay on industrial action at Hexagon House, as well as the ‘fact’ that one of the key people had happened to have been on her honeymoon!

Such statements are nothing but an insult to one’s intelligence.

For the House to obtain a report in August/September when it had been completed as early as March 2011 is totally unacceptable.

We were recently told that although the Mepa-commissioned report was now owned by Mepa itself, no specific follow-up meetings had been held between Mepa and Enemalta, even though Enemalta continued to have strong reservations about the report’s conclusions.

The fact that government had felt compelled to set up a Parliamentary Committee on the subject was the biggest confirmation that even it seemed to have given up hoping that Mepa would deliver.

The committee existed only because the government mistrusted Mepa’s ability to do its job properly as the only competent authority on the environment.

The fact that a report that contained controversial views took so long to be published merely exacerbated the people’s lack of trust in Mepa.

Although in our last committee sitting the Mepa CEO stated that it was obvious that the Marsa power station was most likely the cause of the black dust, Mepa had never adopted such a line in the past. On the contrary, they had regularly tried to pin the blame on other sources, even if passively refraining from excluding the fact that one cannot completely exclude the power station from being the source.

One might argue that the way Mepa has handled the whole saga smacks of sheer incompetence. But, bearing in mind the statements that I will be quoting further on in this article, one cannot but agree with the conclusions of an editorial of your sister publication of 29 September 2011 that stated: “The fact that government has consistently downplayed the problem and that the report has held the government itself accountable has NOT instilled much faith in the processes leading up to the report’s belated publication.”

As has become customary, no one at a political level has even bothered to shoulder political responsibility for this entire mess.

In 2009, the former Mepa Director for the Environment said that although the Stacey Report of 1999 had shed some light on the black dust problem, in his opinion, final studies had failed to compare the fallout particles of Fgura with the fly ash emitted by the power station.

For a long time Mepa seemed to buy Enemalta’s apologetic arguments that there are numerous other possible sources of black dust, including the combustion of fuel other than at the Marsa PS (such as the Marsa incinerator), vehicular traffic, ships entering and leaving the harbours, bakeries and industrial boilers among others.

The local media had understandably registered surprise when, in October 2009, rather than laying the mystery to rest, Mepa opted for even more studies!

While Mr Speaker must be commended for the admirable manner in which he has conducted the hearings and sessions of this Committee, I think this must be the first time ever that the Speaker of a Parliament has been entrusted to carry out a job that should have been long assumed by the environmental watchdog on the island.

But then this is Malta and this is why most of our problems are not only endemic but so country or rather government-specific!

Meanwhile the fat cats at Mepa continue to enjoy the full benefits of their attractive financial packages, bowing their heads in an acknowledging manner to those who have dished out their political appointments in the past years and months.

As for Minister de Marco’s silence – this has not only remained golden but by now has become characteristic of him. He tends to make public statements only when stories can be spun in his favour.

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