Four people on the Isle of Lewis, including two estate workers and two paramedics, were sent to hospital last night after fears they’d been exposed to the banned pesticide Cyanide.
According to a local blogger Iain Maciver (here), Uig Lodge estate owner, Dickon Green ‘accidentally sucked up a bag of cyanide powder‘ with his vacuum cleaner and ‘the deadly poison then shot through the cleaner and came out the other end in a cloud of dust which showered the businessman’.
According to the BBC, “The poison is understood to have been in storage and was for pest control“. If this was Sodium Cyanide, it was banned under the Possession of Pesticides (Scotland) Order 2005 (see here).
The local blogger claims Mr Green was vacuum-packing the deadly powder ‘ready for it to be transported for safe disposal at a mainland poisons depository‘. He goes on: “He’d found it in the lodge where it was thought to have been for many years since previous owners used it for exterminating rats and he had failed to get a local agency to take responsibility for its safe disposal”.
If this version of events is accurate, it raises important questions about the safe disposal of these banned poisons. Who takes responsibility? The local authorities? Or the hapless landowner who may not have the required expertise to safely handle these highly dangerous substances, putting themselves, and others, at great risk?
A spokesman for Northern Constabulary said: “The incident has involved a number of agencies working together and there is not believed to be any further risk to the public“.
More reports on the BBC (here) and STV news (here)
Earlier this year there was another scare involving this banned posion, when gamekeeper Graeme Thompson claimed (falsely) that he’d swallowed Cyanide, along with some razor blades. It resulted in a huge operation involving the emergency services for fear he could contaminate hundreds of nearby residents (see here and here).
Raptor Persecution UK 
The verified facts of this case will need to be left to be established and made public in due course. However, what has been reported serves to illustrate the danger that all these poisons pose. Whilst these substances remain in circulation (and illegal use as this website frequently reports) it is only a matter of time until a child is poisoned. Unfortunately that may be the awful price to be paid to make the legislators and the entire criminal justice system wake up.
Indeed. It seems in this case that the landowner had good intentions but how, exactly, was he intending on moving this poison to the mainland? By mail? By plane? By ferry? An accident waiting to happen…
It’s now more than a probability that sooner or later a member of the public will die as a result of ingesting a banned poisonous substance, the blame will almost certainly be down to the uncontrolled Raptor / predator poisonings that the shooting estates and their like are determined to carry on with at any cost. Watch the sh_t hit the fan then !!!