There will be a meeting at St. Paul’s, Tuesday 16th August, 7.30 as follow up to meeting last week.
More details to follow,
Just testing if there are any e-mails incorrectly entered, will provide more details of meeting in next e-mail later today or tomorrow
Ted
Ted Ryan
Hi All
Bit of a change of plan for next Tuesday. The meeting at St.Paul’s has been cancelled as the City Council has called a residents meeting at the Lahore Karahi at 7.00pm. I have attached a copy of the flyer and ask that if you have not received one of these leaflets you check with your neighbours and let them know about the meeting - I am not too sure of the distribution method adopted by the council.
The second attachment is a list of roads that should have 24 hr security patrols. The lead officer has informed me that these are not being withdrawn. I’m assuming that a patrol entails the security guards walking about and not sitting around in threes and fours in specific locations. Let me know any comments you have and I will pass them on
I have sent the following e-mail to Vennetta Johnston (District Manager) outlining the pertinent points from our meeting last week and our expectations of this meeting with the Council.
See you Tuesday
Ted
Dear residents
Please find attached notes and an attendance list from our meeting last Tuesday, Aug 9th, at Moseley CDT building. You should have received notification that tomorrow night’s (Tuesday 16th) planned residents meeting at St. Paul’s has been postponed in favour of a meeting for residentsorganised by the Council at Lahore Karahi on Ladypool Rd (entrance opposite Birchwood Rd.) at 7pm. Please tell your neighbours and hope to see you at the Lahore Karahi.
Ted
Ted Ryan
Here are the meeting notes. I have added last weeks as some of you said to me last night that you had not received them.
–
Regards
Barry
Cllr Dr Barry Henley
Notes of a Meeting held at Moseley CDT at 7:45p.m.on 9th August 2005
Notes of a Meeting held at Lahore Karahi at 7:00p.m.on 16th August 2005
Dear residents affected by the tornado,
I have taken your names from a couple of circulation lists and have added a few others - but I am mailing this “blind” as I am not sure if you wish your address to be publicly known.
You may be receiving all the information you need but in case you are not, please read - below - what I sent to the Tornado office earlier today. You could ask the office to send you emails directly, or through me or Ted Ryan (though I have not met him yet).
We talked about appointing Street Reps at the meeting last night and some of you may, like me, have already offered to serve. I am not sure how the Council intends to recruit Street Reps, other than asking for volunteers at meetings.
I think that it would make life so much easier if Street Reps were on email, though I am sorry about the social exclusion implications. The roads covered by people with e-mail (or at least on current e-mail circulation lists) are Alder, Anderton Park, Birchwood, Birchwood Crescent, Cadbury, Clifton, Dennis, Ladypool, Queenswood, Sandford, Whitby and Woodstock -
though in some roads there is only one person on e-mail and they may not be willing to serve.
If you would be willing to serve as a Street Rep. please get in touch with me, or Ted Ryan or the Tornado Office. If you know people in other affected roads who may be willing to serve, please tell them to do the same. If you may be willing, but would like to know what you would be expected to do first, a few of us might need to meet to discuss this before the next meeting. If you have suggestions about the duties of a Street Rep. - other than being a point of contact for both the council and your neighbours, putting up notices in your window and holding a stock of information to hand out to your neighbours - please let me know.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes from
Esther Boyd
Dear all
Some of you will have received some of this information already. I apologise for the duplication.
I attach a copy of the most recent council bulletin.
If any of you who cannot read attachments would like a printed copy, please phone me.
I also attach a notice for those who are willing to be street reps to put up in their windows or on notice boards, stuck together as an A3 sheet. Mike Cummins has volunteered for Woodstock Road and Clare Lewis for Birchwood Road. For those who might be interested in serving, the following suggestion is based on a reply I sent to John Newson, following his request for clarification about the rôle of a street rep.
The rôle of a street rep would be to help information flow between Council Departments and local residents, primarily at the moment about issues arising from the tornado but long term on any issues concerning local residents. My view is that the street reps would all be active members of the same Residents Association, thus gaining strength in numbers and
credibility to the Council. With e-mail the Council could copy information both to the Residents Association Chair and all street reps so that street reps could pass the information on immediately without waiting for a meeting. Meetings would be held when there were issues that needed wider discussion or decisions about strategies.
It would be for those involved to chose which Residents Association. There are at least three choices:
- We received an invitation to a meeting next week to create “Anderton Park Residents Association”. From the attached questionnaire its interests appear to predate the tornado. There are no contact details - is this Ted Ryan?.
- Woodstock Residents and Tenants Association still exists, with some money in the bank, so that could be reborn.
- Joining Balsall Heath Forum might give the group more strength.
We need a meeting to decide this - and not at the same time as a BCC meeting on the tornado (The Anderton Park RA meeting is also on August 23rd).
John Newson has also written to several of us with a suggestion that the Health and Safety Executive should be told of our concerns about asbestos.
Our experiences, which follow, may be typical of other residents.
On the Sunday following the tornado, workmen started to demolish our garage, without any warning to us. Howard stopped them as the garage was still full of our possessions. He didn’t think of it at the time, but they started with the roof and were taking no precautions about the corrugated asbestos sheeting.
On Wednesday we had a tree surgeon felling dangerous trees on our property (at huge expense which I hope our insurance will cover) who was anxious about branches falling on the asbestos garage roof, which could have broken the asbestos and thus caused dangerous flying particles.
I managed eventually to get masks from the Portakabin - they took ages to find them, not realising that they had some. I was given one protective suit by someone from Morrisons (I think that is the name of the firm with the vans to take the asbestos away) but there were no gloves available. The tree surgeon used our neighbour’s hose to damp down the garage roof and, as they had masks, the men were happy to do the tree felling. They were not
handling the asbestos - that will be the job of whoever demolishes the garage. I still have the unused protective suit and 2 unused masks.
I think that it is a good idea to get the HSE involved. I also have concerns about scaffolding that does not appear to me to have adequate safety features. For instance the toe board on the scaffolding at the front of our house stops short of the stretch above our front door, which is where I think that it is needed most. I did not spot this before our scaffolders
left yesterday but I will bring it to the attention of anyone who climbs the scaffold. They left no ladders at our house but opposite us unprotected ladders have been left on the scaffold for several days. If the HSE do visit, a scaffold inspection would also be a good idea.
That’s all for now, perhaps I will see you in the park today.
Esther
Hello again
Apologies for writing again today, but this is short and may be helpful to you and/or your neighbours..
If anyone is suffering from shock, trauma and stress after the tornado, and would benefit from therapeutic massage (Zero Balancing), this will be available at the Tornado tea room (Tea cup in a Storm) along with free tea and coffee, at Sure Start, Malvern Street on Monday 22nd and Tuesday 23rd between 1pm and 3pm. Phone 446 6183 for details. Please tell anyone who might benefit from this service.
The tea room is open from Monday to Friday between 1pm and 3pm.
You may also be interested in the following websites:
http://www.b13.co.uk/tornado/ - site managed by Mike Cummins of Woodstock Road
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/birmingham/2005/08/321260.html - notes of tornado meetings written by a “local resident”
Esther Boyd
The venue of tomorrow’s meeting - the City Council organised one - has been
changed to:
St Paul’s School
Corner of Hertford Street and Clifton Road
Tuesday 23 August 2005
7.00pm for 7.15pm start.
I have now got copies of all the Tornedo information sheets issued to date,
so if you can’t get to the meeting but would like copies, please let me know
I am putting a “read receipt” on this and will phone people tomorrow, whose
phone numbers I know, who have not opened it.
Esther
Last night two meetings took place, one organised by the City Council at St Paul’s in Balsall Heath with about 40 residents present, the other organised by residents at the Community Development Trust in Moseley with about 20 residents present. I hope that the organisers of both meetings will provide notes of actions agreed and, in due course, provide an update of the result of these actions.
The NEXT MEETING organised by the City Council is not on Tuesday, but on WEDNESDAY 31st August at 7.00 at St Paul’s, corner of Hertford Street and Clifton Road.
Following these meetings things have progressed today:
1) A stall has been allocated to us at the Farmers’ Market in Moseley on Saturday to publicise the effect of the tornado and that, contrary to the belief of people who live outside the area, we will be living with the problems for a very long time.
Bez Pitcher is organising a collection of laminated A4 photos of the area, and a display of short descriptions by residents of what happened on July 28th, what has happened since, and how this has affected our lives, including any silver linings to that very black cloud.
If you have any suitable photos for this display, please send them to me by e-mail, or deliver them to Bez at 31 Queenswood Road (phoning 449 4050 first to make sure that she is in).
If you would like to send the short written piece by e-mail I will print it on a post card - these will be put in a box on the stall for people to read - or you could write the card yourself and deliver it to Bez.
People will be needed at the stall all day to talk to passers by, give out information and collect information - from about 9 a.m. to about 3 p.m. Can you help for a while? Please let me know by replying to this e-mail or by phoning Bez on 449 4050.
2) Further discussions have taken place about how to make sure that information about decisions taken by the Local Authority and others are passed on to residents, and to make sure that the needs and views of everyone affected by the tornado are heard by decision makers.
The Sparkbrook Ward Support Officer, Becky Jones, agreed to include a paragraph in the next Tornado Bulletin stating that Street Representatives/Street Champions are needed, and asking people who are interested in taking on this role to come to a meeting to find out more
about it (or send in their details if they are unable to attend).
All community groups in the area (the Forums, Residents Associations etc) will be contacted and asked to attend the same meeting, with details of any Street Representatives/Street Champions/Good Neighbours who are already active (or send in their details if they are unable to attend). If you are aware of a group in the affected area that may not be known by Becky Jones, please send me details, or send them direct to her at
Becky_Jones@birmingham.gov.uk.
3) The need to preserve the damaged trees in the area and to plant new trees is recognised by the Moseley Society and the Moseley in Bloom committee and both are offering help to residents.
There will be a Moseley Society meeting to which residents are invited to share experiences of the tornado and hear from a climatologist about how the tornado was formed and the chances of a recurrence, and also hear advice about tree planting - Tuesday 30th August 7.15 - 9 p.m. at St Martin de Porres School.
Advice can also be given by natalie@moseleyinbloom.org.uk
That will do for now
Esther Boyd
Dear Fellow residents
Please find attached the following items:
We have been sent copies of the Tornado briefings issued by the Sparkbrook District Office on 9, 16, 23, 31 August – we are asking that these be posted on the website www.b13.co.uk/tornado
Other notes:
Cllr. Henley’s request for business people and residents to be included in the first meeting of local Councillors and officers organised by Cllr. Ken Hardeman, Cabinet member for Regeneration has been turned down.
Clive Dutton on Sept 2nd has said that the Police do not have the resources to increase police presence in the area and that the level of crime has not increased since police and security presence was reduced. Council will work with police and local residents/businesses to develop a neighbourhood business watch initiative. Council will ensure improved lighting (2 spotlights) on Birchwood Rd and Alder Rd by early next week.
Hope to see you at St Paul’s on Wednesday
Ted, Esther & Pauline