Killamarsh community's 'Erin Brockovich' style campaign against pollution remembered in book Two Clouds Too Many

RASP was formed in response to two incidents of noxious gas clouds leaking from the the Sarp plant, which was near Rother Valley Country Park, in May 1998.

It was a battle that took residents from the streets of their working class village to a march on the Champs-Élysées towards company bosses at their Paris headquarters.

Mr Moran, now retired and living in Guardamar del Segura in Spain, said it was always a “bone of contention for me that this group would not be remembered.

"And so, in 2011 or 12, I decided to write this book and it gathered dust in my outhouse for the best part of 10 years. But last year I decided that I was going to make sure that this group was always remembered. And I knew if I wrote the book and I published it that the campaign group, RASP, would never be forgotten.

"One of the things I would say that really pleases me is, I’ve been reading reviews on Amazon now. A young lady reviewed it last week, she said: ‘I couldn’t believe that all this happened just a mile down the road from where I live’. She said: ‘This was proper Erin Brockovich stuff here in Killamarsh and I did not know’.”

After the leaks, the group demonstrated continually in the area – often led by an anonymous member dressed as the grim reaper – and hosted its Toxic Night Shift protests outside the Sarp site on the Norwood Industrial Estate.

But one of Mr Moran’s most enduring memories of the 18 month campaign was the trip by a coach load of protestors to Paris in July 1998. After demonstrating outside company headquarters, “they invited four (of us) in and about 40 followed,” he said.

They had taken a petition signed by 7,000 people but also managed to speak with company bosses.

The sight of a boy in a Sheffield Wednesday shirt, sat in a boss’s chair, was a “something that I would never forget,” says Mr Moran, whose wife Sandra was also part of the campaign.

It was announced in November 1999 that the hazardous waste incinerator would be shut down and in December that year Sarp was fined £120,000 and ordered to pay £150,000 costs by a judge at Derby Crown Court after the company admitted liability for the leaks at Killamarsh on May 14 and May 30 in 1998. The incinerator was pulled down March 21, 2002.

"At the beginning, maybe a thousand people were marching with us,” said Mr Moran.

“At the end, we’d probably got 50 to 100 dedicated campaigners to chase this company all over Europe. We marched on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, took it to the EU, took it to Parliament, protested in Matlock - we took over a major county council meeting there – protested at the Swallow Hotel in Sheffield, invaded the boardroom of Vivendi in Paris.

"This group had no fear, but it never caused any damage like a lot of protest groups. We protested with civil disobedience and we did not damage anybody, we didn’t involve any other people, it was a direct battle between us and this company and that’s how we made it.”

Mr Moran says that was the reason for their success. “We always kept public opinion on our side, didn’t alienate (ourselves) and we never used violence.”

It had been his first foray into any kind of activism.

"I wouldn’t speak up if anyone paid me a fortune,” he said. “I used to sit in the corner and never speak. I don’t know what came over me with this campaign – something changed.”

In his role as campaign press officer, he would speak to The Yorkshire Post and other publications, and appeared on television. The village’s women, though, were the “backbone” of the campaign, he said. "To me, it was an eye-opener of what ordinary people can do.”

Veolia, to which Vivendi changed its name, has been contacted for comment.