Dundee City Council has been told to get its act together over refuse disposal sites after a weekend of chaos when one of only two facilities to serve the whole population was closed by flooding.
The Riverside site was marooned after excess rainwater submerged the entrance, leaving a queue of motorists with boot-loads of refuse angry and frustrated.
They included one motorist who had driven nine miles from Broughty Ferry with bulky garden waste after discovering that he could not leave that material at his local Baldovie site.
The council streamlined its recycling service to save more than £300,000, with Marchbanks being closed, Baldovie not taking bulky garden waste and Riverside rejecting bulky building debris.
The new arrangements have not gone smoothly, with people in Broughty Ferry complaining about having to make a near 20-mile round trip to Riverside with cut shrubbery.
West End residents have the same journey with rubble that is too bulky to put into their household wheelie bins.
The problem reached its peak on Saturday morning after the previous day’s heavy rain. A combination of flash flooding and the low-lying landscape meant that the area around the Riverside site became engulfed.
West End councillor Fraser Macpherson said his constituents and people elsewhere in Dundee were “sick and tired” of the council’s failures over recycling facilities.
When the Marchbanks depot was closed, he sought assurances from the environment department that the Riverside site would be open at all advertised times.
“My main concern at that time was the regular flooding issues at Riverside and I received assurances that these were being tackled by the city engineer,” he said. “Saturday’s situation shows that the flooding situation has not been properly resolved and this comes on top of previous unavailability of the facility one Saturday last month due to the skips not being emptied.
“One constituent told me the man behind him in the queue was hopping mad as he had tried the previous day to drop off garden waste at Baldovie and had been told to go to Riverside. He had just driven 10 miles from his home in the east part of Broughty Ferry only to find the facility he had been told to go to was closed because of flooding. It really is a quite unacceptable situation and the council really does have to get its act together.
“After closing Marchbanks, the council should have made Riverside and Baldovie open for all types of refuse. This would have been in the interests of the environment to prevent the pollution from all the extra car journeys across town with people carrying their bulky garden or general rubble and preventing inconvenience.”
Broughty Ferry councillor Derek Scott said: “The flooding at Riverside has been known about for a very long time and, before they made these changes, the council should have made sure the Riverside site could be fully open, or it should haveprovided proper alternative facilities.”
A council spokesman said: “The council will be taking forward work at the Riverside recycling centre to deal with flooding issues as soon as possible.”