YOUR front-page story – Hundreds of jobs for town with industrial site plans (Keighley News, February 16) – was of a proposed industrial development "on a 26-acre partial-greenbelt site between the River Aire and the A650".
This site is wholly within the Environment Agency’s most extreme Flood Zone 3 and more than 20 acres of it within the current greenbelt.
Flood plains are favoured by developers because the land is flat and cheap to acquire and they don’t care that the probably inadequate flood defences they have to install will impact negatively on land and buildings immediately up river.
Ironically, a major development like this would have been a much more beneficial solution for the former gasworks site now being developed as an industrial incinerator. OK, so the gasworks site is only a quarter of the size, but the computer-generated image you show suggests this development will be mostly open space which – in the short term at least – is a total waste of space, and in the long term contains the threat the traffic generated by the site has the potential to overwhelm the already inadequate improvements to traffic flow that turning Hard Ings Road into a dual carriageway will bring.
ROGER CHAPMAN
Thwaites Brow
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