Incendiary and inhumane. This is what entrepreneur Mart van Osta calls the stacked container homes for migrant workers on an industrial estate in Roosendaal. Part of it is already inhabited, but entrepreneurs are fiercely critical of safety and living conditions.
The container homes on the industrial estate on Atoomweg and Spectrum are four stories high. An employment agency wants to place several hundred migrant workers there. About twenty to fifty people have recently moved in there.
Even though the building is not yet completely fireproof. When the fire brigade carried out a final check there, it turned out that the outer facade did not meet the safety requirements.
‘My company is eight meters away’
“Fire safety is our biggest concern at the moment,” says Van Osta, who has a transport company and a car wash on the business park. His car wash is next to the migrant worker hotel. “If one container catches fire, there is a chance that an entire block will go with it. And my company is eight meters away.”
The municipality says that the living situation is safe. On the advice of the fire brigade, people are allowed to live on the ground floor and first floor ‘under certain conditions’.
These conditions mean that there are restrictions on smoking, a maximum of two people are allowed in one residential unit and there must be a so-called fire watch day and night. This is someone who monitors and intervenes when necessary. The facade must also be completely fireproof by June 15 at the latest.
More worries
Yet Van Osta believes that housing people there remains a risk. But there are more things that worry him. The migrant worker hotel is located between companies, which makes it not a nice place to live, according to him. “We are also afraid that we will be hindered in our business operations if we want to expand in the future.”
In his opinion, the roads are also not designed to accommodate a few hundred people. In addition, more and more freight traffic is driving through the industrial estate. “That is a danger to the residents themselves.”
Since the companies will soon have so many new neighbors, there is also fear of nuisance. Van Osta says he has already had problems with residents who have been there for three weeks. “Especially in the first week, we had a nuisance from people smoking cannabis and people staying on our sites.”
