2023-11-23 14:24:34
Who decided not to communicate with the municipalities following the discovery of Pfas pollution in the distribution water in the south of the country? To this question, at the center of the questions of Walloon deputies this Thursday in the Environment committee of the regional parliament, the general director of administration, Bénédicte Heindrichs provides this lunar response: “the proposal to communicate to the municipalities was not accepted; That doesn’t mean we decided not to communicate. »
“To do it once more, of course we should have communicated. We should have done otherwise and we learned the lesson that we directly applied in the case of Ronquières,” she admitted, however, also recognizing the “cacophony” of the first recommendations to the municipalities, denounced between others, by Jean-Luc Crucke (Les Engagés) and Jacqueline Galant (MR). “We had to respond urgently to numerous requests coming from different stakeholders,” defended Bénédicte Heindrichs.
“On behalf of the entire administration, we apologize to the population and to the mayors for not having understood the extent of the anger and the questions on the ground,” added the official.
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At the request of the deputies, the latter also returned to the relations between the office of the Minister of the Environment Céline Tellier and the administration. “These relationships are framed by a protocol which establishes that communication must be done through hierarchical channels,” explained the director. Since then, specific coordination on Pfas has been put in place, with an agent now responsible for coordinating the different elements of the file and ensuring that information circulates well.
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