Traffic chaos fury at dump

The Minster Road site reopened just before Easter after five months of refurbishment - but the new set-up has been slammed as a "fiasco" by district dumpers.

Severn Waste Services, which manages the site on behalf of Worcestershire County Council, has been carrying out major engineering work by making the site a split-level facility and installing compaction equipment.

But a reduction in the number of cars allowed to unload their waste at one time has led to long queues on the main road from Kidderminster and congestion on the slip road from Stourport.

Paul Turner, of Spencer Street, Kidderminster, is among many people to have waited for as long as 40 minutes to access the spaces provided for depositing rubbish into skips.

He said: "As a mere simpleton even I can see that the council does not want to encourage more people to use the site but less.

"I can just imagine the chaos over the Christmas period - or perhaps they will have then built a 200-seat cafeteria where we can while the hours away with our rubbish."

Stourport Road resident Richard Mason was fearful of the danger of disgruntled drivers pulling out of the slip-road queue into traffic, which he described as a "recipe for disaster".

"What a fiasco the new waste site is. It's as if the person who designed the layout had never visited the site, or cannot count.

"If this is a sample of waste management, they have clearly failed."

Severn Waste Services operations director John Lashley said the site had been made a split-level facility to eradicate the problem of people slipping on steps leading up to skips - with the "downside" being traffic problems arising from the new arrangement.

But he added: "We used to have more containers but have moved to a situation where people have to move in an orderly queue.

"It's a learning curve - getting people used to the different arrangement, managing traffic flow to the site and getting attendants trained."