FORMER pit communities lost their fight to block a new opencast site on their doorstep yesterday.

Britain’s biggest mining company, UK Coal, was given planing permission for five years of workings near Crook, County Durham, yesterday, ten years after campaigners stopped a larger development.

Opponents told a Durham County Council development control meeting yesterday that the 127- hectare site will be about the 50th opencast site in as many years in the Tow Law and Crook area, and the 12th since 1965.

Wind turbines being erected on the same hillside are adding to the pressure on the environment, opponents told the meeting.

Communities affected by the site, which will add 154 lorries a day to traffic on the A68, will share a community fund, which reached £177,000 yesterday when UK Coal added 10p a tonne from its future fireclay sales.

Some properties in Sunniside and White Lea will get mains gas for the first time.

With UK Coal promising 60 jobs at the site and spinoff benefits, councillors said the economic benefits outweighed potential problems, such as dust, noise, and environmental damage.

Councillor Joe Armstrong said: “We would be absolutely mad to turn down jobs and the economic benefit that is going to be generated.

“This company has bent over backwards to make sure that the benefits to the community are real benefits.”

UK Coal will start work in April and will extract 1.27 million tonnes of coking coal and up to 500,000 tonnes of brick-making fireclay.

Project manager Richard Corey said the company had addressed issues raised when a bid for the larger site at White Lea Farmwas rejected in 1996.

The firm has reduced the size of the site, cut the working time by nearly three years and moved workings away from homes.

But Fitch Wilson, from the Durham and Teesdale Branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: “Opencast mining is one of the most environmentally destructive processes being undertaken in the UK. Tow Law and the surrounding countryside has had more than its share.

“When land is opencast mined, all is destroyed, the underlying rock formation built up over millions of years, the soil structure, the water table, the trees, plants and grass.”

Objector Peter Irving said the views of residents had been ignored. He said: “The villages have had to put up with the associated harassment for decades.

“The dust has not settled from these and we are asked yet again to grin and bear the inconvenience.”