2024-02-13 15:06:44
At the first trial, in 2022, justice had particularly insisted on the “chistorical circumstances“having brought this region, close to Marseille,”to be chosen, due to its geographical location, to be one of the main national sites for industrial development“.
The local residents, who had attacked several companies, including the steelmaker ArcelorMittal and the oil group Esso, invoking in particular a “anxiety harm“, then decided to appeal.
“We are not fighting once morest manufacturers, we are fighting once morest the pollution they emit by far exceeding standards.“, explained a local resident, Jackie Huriaux, 74 years old.
“In our driveway, there are twelve of us, eight died of cancer, (…) and in my work I can tell you that it was impressive as the years went by“, continued this former liberal nurse, ensuring that when she “installed in 1972, there was no talk of cancer“.
“Air quality in Fos is not worse” et “sometimes much better“that elsewhere, however, said ArcelorMittal’s lawyer at the bar, regretting the”apocalyptic image made” by the opposing party.
The lawyer for PVC plastic manufacturer Kem One insisted that his company was established on the site in 1963, a decade before Jackie Huriaux and her husband bought their home nearby.
“We didn’t know at all what to expect, we came for a job“, summarized Ms. Huriaux, whose husband was a technician at ArcelorMittal: “Industrialists treated us like trash“.
The two parties discussed at length the Fos-Epseal study, published in 2017, which had thrown a wrench into the pond among the region’s inhabitants by concluding in particular that the women interviewed in Port-Saint-Louis and Fos-sur-Mer had three times more cancers than the national average.
Until this publication, local residents had not “imagined that they might attack the companies that supported them, since most of them work in these companies“, explained their lawyer, Me Julie Andreu, recalling that one of the people she defended had succumbed to several cancers during the proceedings.
The decision will be made on May 16.
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