La protestation des acteurs économiques s'organise sur l'île, relayée par la presse britannique, sur le "mur de silence" autour des problèmes rencontrés pour l'ouverture commerciale de l'aéroport, reportée depuis maintenant 4 mois sans nouvelles ni délai. Les rumeurs les plus folles circulent sans possibilité d'infirmer ou de confirmer ici leur réalité: problème insoluble ou recherche d'une alternative ? Même les résultats partiels des études en cours sur les statistiques de vent ne sont pas publiés ... Restons optimiste et wait and see ...
Voici l'article original du Guardian
How wind shear could affect flights in St Helena
St Helena islanders want compensation over unusable new
£285m airport
Isolated UK outpost in South Atlantic expected to attract
tourists but runway is deemed too windy to land planes on
It was due to herald the end of St Helena’s status as
Britain’s most marooned but populated island outpost, but instead the airport
has become a runway to nowhere, on course to take off as the
government’s
biggest overseas aid fiasco.
The airport cost £285m to build and was due to open on 21
May, intended to boost the economy of the British overseas territory. Instead
the opening has been delayed indefinitely after it was discovered that the wind
shear was so severe that commercial planes cannot land, leaving the isolated
South Atlantic island without a clear economic future and the taxpayer facing a
multimillion-pound bill.
There are now demands from the island’s 4,000-strong
population for compensation and the St Helena legislative council this week
passed a motion calling for an independent inquiry into the catalogue of
errors, including where responsibility lies.
Leading figures on the council this week demanded the
release of further information from the UK government over when it knew there
was likely to be a serious problem with unpredictable and dangerous wind speeds
if Whitehall went ahead with building the airport.
The international development secretary, Priti Patel, has
responded to the criticism by saying she will establish a panel of experts to
look into how the airport can be made to work.
“Clearly some decisions were not up to scratch, but this is
not a postmortem. It is about finding a solution,” a government source said.
Ministers are resisting offering any compensation to those that made
investments on the basis that as many as 30,000 tourists would fly to visit the
remote but beautiful island.
As a stop-gap measure, the Department for International
Development has also agreed to an extension for RMS St Helena until next year.
Built in 1990, the boat, which makes a four- to five-day trip from South
Africa, had been due to be decommissioned but will continue as the island’s
rusty lifeline.
Although plans for an airport have been circulating in
Whitehall for over a decade, DfID was warned of the risk of high winds in a Met
Office report commissioned in October 2014 and completed in January 2015. The report,
sent to the St Helena government, warned of alarming wind speeds, but the site
for the airport had been chosen three years before that report.
In 2011, the then foreign secretary William Hague and the
then international development secretary Andrew Mitchell nevertheless pressed
ahead with the runway construction claiming it would be value for money, even
though it was deemed high risk. After the construction of the airport, tests
proved the wind shear was indeed dangerous.
Some St Helena residents, represented by a 49-strong
council, claim the fiasco means they have lost tens of thousands in modernising
now empty hotels, eating into their savings. But the UK government-appointed
governor of the island, Lisa Phillips, insisted in a letter to residents that
ministers will not help out. She wrote: “I need to be clear that the St Helena
government cannot be held liable for any losses for any businesses that
anticipated a definite start date for operations. This was not in our gift and
our communications have always stated this risk.”
The chairman of the legislative council’s economic
development committee, Henry Lawson, in a speech at the council this week
called for an independent inquiry. “So much has been done to gather information
about the wind conditions that exist at the airport, but sadly, much of this
was after the runway has been laid and one has to question how such a
monumental project can be carried out without doing these extensive tests
before,” he said.
“Who was responsible for approving the final runway design
with the current alignment without first carrying out the necessary tests to
ensure that aircraft could land safely from the approach that the runway was
constructed for, taking into account also that the design of the runway is to
enable landings from two approaches?
“The question therefore, is why were there no further
studies carried out into the severe weather conditions and the amount of
turbulence that was known to exist before the final design and alignment of the
runway was finalised?” Lawson added.
In Britain, the Labour peer Lord Foulkes has taken up the
issue and is pressing ministers to explain the sequence, and logic, of its
flawed decision-making. He has asked the chair of the public accounts
committee, Meg Hillier, to call in the relevant ministers. The investment in
the airport has already been condemned as likely to be bad value for money by
the National Audit Office.
Foulkes says “islanders feel they have had to reply on leaks
of information, giving the impression to islanders that they are facing a wall
of silence. The latest panel of experts means further indefinite delay”.
Lord Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of the
Conservative party who resigned from the Lords last year, has obtained a copy
of the internal Met Office report. He said: “Why was the Met Office report only
commissioned when the building work for the new airport was in its final
stages, ie far too late to relocate the runway if it highlighted insurmountable
problems?
“Why was the Met Office report not immediately made public –
or, at the very least, shared at once with ‘relevant parties’ so that they
could make contingency plans?”
Hazel Wilmot, the owner of the Consulate hotel on the
island, has written to Foulkes to complain of the costs of expanding her hotel:
“Had I known, I for one would not have embarked on the costly planning
exercise, with architect’s fees, nor would I have proceeded with the major
renovations at the hotel, employed extra staff to cope with the expected influx
of tourists, purchased stock, fixtures, fittings, equipment and the like.”
Whitehall sources suggest some of the complaints of lost
income are questionable, but Patel, known for her determination to root out
waste from her department, has a jumbo-sized mess to clear up.
• This article was amended on 22 September 2016. An earlier
version said Lord Ashcroft had taken leave of absence from the Lords. Ashcroft
resigned from the Lords last year.
