Three hungry rats poke their noses out from behind the abandoned car seat they have made their temporary home.
My mechanic found gnawed cables and rat tracks when he opened my engine. It’s horrific
They peer around, their gaze flitting between a mound of oozing rubbish bags and the putrid torso of a dead dog. Some metres away, a series of large office blocks belonging to some of Malta’s top firms sit glistening in the summer sun.
The periphery of Mrieħel’s industrial estate lies in a state of disarray, with exasperated workers contacting The Sunday Times to complain about their unhygienic surroundings.
“I’m ashamed to invite clients over to our offices,” the director of one company in the area said.
“Bin bags, mattresses, scrap metal – you name it, it’s there.”
Caught between the heart of the industrial estate and Mriehel’s residential area, the area was described as a “no man’s land” by one worker.
And the suffix appears to be an apt one, with Qormi local council and Malta Industrial Parks each disclaiming responsibility for the area.
An MIP spokesman told The Sunday Times that the filthy area was not, and had never been, within its administrative region.
Qormi mayor Rosianne Cutajar said the local council was only responsible for rubbish within Mrieħel’s residential area.
Rubbish along the industrial zone was MIP’s responsibility, she said.
The two parties are currently locked in a dispute over waste collection in the area, Ms Cutajar said.
“We’ve had similar problems in Ħandaq, but I can’t say anyone’s ever raised the issue of rubbish in Mrieħel with us.”
But while authorities wrangle over responsibility for the area, just where a multi-million Corporate Village has been earmarked, workers continue to face the mess every working day.
Festering rubbish has attracted its fair share of unwanted fauna, as wild dogs roamed the area and rodents multiplied in the many empty fields nearby.
“It’s particularly bad at night. I collected my car at around 11.30 p.m. a few weeks ago and the road was packed with rats,” one worker said.
Rats have grown so accustomed to mingling around parked vehicles that they have reportedly taken to nestling inside car engines.
“My mechanic found gnawed cables and rat tracks when he opened my engine. It’s horrific.”
People often left rubbish out on the road in the expectation that a rubbish truck would collect it the following morning.
But the trucks never came, said commuter Simon Debono.
“There’s no regular waste collection service, so rubbish sits there for weeks. What makes it worse is that there’s a children’s playground a couple of hundred metres away,” said Mr Debono, who is a director for an Mrieħel-based brand communication company.
He and his co-workers had reported problems to the sanitation authorities on more than one occasion, “but not much seems to have changed”.
Asked to comment, the Environmental Health Directorate was unable to access the necessary records before going to print, due to an ongoing office move.
A Health Ministry spokesman however assured The Sunday Times that the necessary information would be made available on Monday morning.