HS Vantaa | “Unfortunately, this is not the only car lying at the bottom of Finnish waterways” – The car lying at the bottom of a popular swimming pond has been known to the city for a long time

Helsinki Sanomat said last week, that a small amount of oil has spilled into the Ruskeasanta pond from a car lying at the bottom of the pond. The former mine pit has been an unofficial swimming spot for decades.

The maintenance manager of the city of Vantaa is responsible for the post-treatment of oil damage Jyrki Vättöwho told HS as follows:

“The car is automatically removed from the pond when it is known that there is such an environmental problem there, even if it is minor.”

Itthat the car was at the bottom of the pond should not be a surprise to the city of Vantaa. The car has been in the pond for decades and it can also be seen in the video filmed by a diver from 2009. You can watch clips from the video About HSwhich was written in 2020.

The city of Vantaa cleaned the lot in 2018, and the land use engineer of the city of Vantaa Teemu Jääskeläinen told HS that, among other things, sofa furniture and household appliances were taken from there. Cleaning the pit cost about 10,000 euros.

Why wasn’t Teemu Jääskeläinen removed from the car at that time?

“The city hasn’t had enough sturdy equipment for that, and on the other hand, there hasn’t been an acute need to lift a car.”

The car, which had been at the bottom of the pond for decades, was not considered to cause anyone any harm. On the contrary, it has been an interesting diving destination for divers practicing at the pond.

“If we had known that there were fluids inside the car, we would have intervened,” says Jääskeläinen.

The pond is a groundwater area, so now that it is known that the car is leaking oil, it must be removed.

Vantaa Environmental inspector of the Environmental Center Maarit Rantataro says that normally abandoned scrap vehicles are scrapped, i.e. they are given a transfer request. If it is not followed, the municipality will take the vehicles to temporary storage. If the cars are not picked up, they are either sold or scrapped.

The fate of a car lying at the bottom of the water, on the other hand, is more complicated.

“In this case, I don’t think anyone is putting those tags on the bottom of the car,” says Rantataro.

The Waste Act obliges to clean up harmful garbage, but the schedule for cleaning is a different matter. A car that has been lying at the bottom of a pond for decades is not necessarily at the top of the urgent list.

“Unfortunately, this is not the only car lying at the bottom of Finnish waterways. However, the city of Vantaa reacted quickly when the information about the car’s oil leak was received,” says Rantataro.

A car or carsbecause there is another car and a moped in the pond, according to Jyrki Vätö, we are trying to get out of the pond as soon as possible.

“Implementation planning is underway. Lifting the cars out of the pond and transporting them away seems relatively challenging.”

According to Vätö, it is difficult to bring an Autocrane to the pond due to the narrowness of the place, and the city is still thinking about other options. Lifting balls may be used to help bring the cars to the surface and can be moved to dry land.

The rescue service of Itä-Uusimaa together with the Border Guard will lift the vehicles from the pond.

“The lifting operation is probably mainly carried out as official work, i.e. as a rescue exercise, in which case no money actually moves in the work,” Vättö estimates.

According to Vätö, there is still other debris at the bottom of the pond, such as a freezer, garden furniture and shopping carts. However, they will not be removed now, but the lifting operation will focus on cars, because they are considered to be the most harmful to the environment.

New cars are hardly driven into the pond anymore, as the city put road barriers on the road leading to the pond in connection with the cleaning in 2018.

Read more: Divers found a nasty surprise at the bottom of a popular swimming spot: an old car wreck leaking oil into the pond

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