It is a shame Anne Guedes no longer posts on here as she has local knowledge, and could have provided a second opinion.
Other posters, including me, can only make conjectures.
Just to interject on this point, please may I clarify?
Anne Guedes has commented on my blog on my posts on this subject.
I have a policy on comments on my blog, and they are pretty much akin to the rules of this forum. Be civil, no libel etc. If someone does that and posts a comment that contradicts my personal opinion, it gets published. You can find several such comments. My blog is not SIL rules. If you wish to comment then Wordpress, not me, stacks your very first comment up for my explicit approval before it appears. If you then comment again using THE SAME ORIGINATING DETAILS, Wordpress automatically approves it. Should I object to the comment I have to manually take it down.
Spam goes into a spam folder, so may I concentrate on non-spam comments?
The stats to date are simple. 100% of comments received have been published. Not a single one has ever been taken down.
Anne Guedes is not a prolific comment maker on my blog. From her comments, she is of the opinion that the transfer station was a compacting station in 2007. I believe this was based on a phone call to the station. I have no info on when this call was made. I have no info on how the conversation went, what questions were put, or the answers.
She made a comment to the effect that a phone call had established this was a compacting station in 2007. I was happy to allow that comment to remain on my blog. It is still there. You can still see it. I happen to be of the opinion it was not, based on what the site looks like in Google Earth at the time.
This is not a case of is Anne correct or am I correct. It is a case of does it make a difference?
Lots of waste in Luz still goes into the rubbish without being sorted out into recyclables, toxic waste, and 'OK' waste. And it still has to be picked over, by law, to achieve a number of things, notably the removal of toxic waste.
I have yet to see a general waste lorry that does not use compaction at the point of pick-up. Therefore I am in agreement with Anne that such general waste was definitely compacted at at least one point before it's final destination.
Anne and I appear to be in disagreement over whether the transfer station was a compacting station. As I have said, this disagreement is public on my blog, so you can see it for yourself.
The waste was probably compacted at the pick-up point. Whether it was compacted at a transfer station is in issue. However, to conduct the removal of toxic waste requires that it was de-compacted at the dump site, and picked through to take out stuff that was not legal.
Can I prove with 100% certainty that Madeleine did not suffer this fate? No, I clearly can't.
The trigger for the article on my blog was a news story about the body of very, very young child which had been found at the landfill site for the rubbish in southern Lisbon. The report was dark, because it was unclear whether the child's body had been put into rubbish as it was found, decapitated and in bits and pieces. Or whether the body went in whole, and the sorting machinery inflicted the damage.
Could Madeleine have evaded such checks? Yes. But in a civil or criminal court, you would have to place a whole lot more in front of me to get me to vote that it happened.
Based on the information I have, there is no reason to believe that Madeleine died in apartment 5A, and there is no reason to believe that she ended up in a wheelie bin on this side of the Algarve.
