Man at the front in foot and mouth battle

'I'VE got my coffee," says the Brigadier, bounding into the room. He turns to his army press officer. "Are you getting them a coffee?" he asks. He's a man who I would guess does a lot of bounding. A tall man in combat fatigues, trim and bursting with energy. Sitting at a desk, he looks ill at ease: as if he can't wait to get up and away again.

He's probably not spent much time sitting recently. Since the end of March, Brigadier Andrew Farquhar, commander of the Army's 15 (North East) Brigade based at Imphal Barracks, has headed the military side of the operation to control foot and mouth across a huge swathe of the North East, from the Scottish borders to Lincolnshire.

Prime Minister Tony Blair may have talked in mid-May about being on the home straight, and at that time there actually was a day when no new cases of the disease were recorded anywhere in the country.

But try telling that now to farmers around Settle or up on the North York Moors - for every day brings the devastating prospect of finding the infection in their own livestock.

The Brigadier is blunt.

"We have always known that when cattle were taken out from their winter housing into the fields there would be a 'bumpy tail', because we knew there was disease we had not identified," he says. He is referring to the tail-end of the graph which charts new cases around the country, and which is no longer showing the steady decline experienced in May.

"We're on a knife-edge at the moment in North Yorkshire. We've got outbreaks where we were frankly not expecting them, and where they are creeping towards areas of greater animal population - potentially the large concentrations of dairy cattle and pigs in North Yorkshire."

The nightmare scenario, he admits, is if the disease somehow got into the cattle and pig herds of the Vale of York and East Yorkshire. That's not impossible, as the recent case at Northallerton demonstrates.

It's a prospect that makes all the more vital the huge and continuing efforts to halt the spread of the disease. Something like 250 troops are already deployed in the region in the fight against foot and mouth. And while the Brigadier is 'optimistic' that it will never happen, contingency plans to deal with any spread of the disease into the Vale of York and East Yorkshire have been in place for weeks.

Army 'forward control' units have been established in places such as Beverley, and nearly 300 sites across the region have been studied as possible mass burial locations. A 'handful' in the southern part of North Yorkshire have been identified as having potential - though for use only as a last resort.

The effort to contain foot and mouth has involved the Army, vets, farmers and officials from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), formerly MAFF.

Vets and officials from DEFRA have the expertise, and are in overall charge. What the military brings to the operation is command and control structures, strong lines of communication and the ability to make rapid decisions in a crisis.

"It is DEFRA'S operation," the Brigadier says. "They co-ordinate it. All we ask them to do is tell us the farms that need to be slaughtered, tell us the farms that are contiguous in veterinary terms, tell us the areas where there may have been some contact.

"We then deploy troops on to the ground to assist in the co-ordination of valuation, slaughter, disposal and disinfecting of farm properties."

Troops aren't directly involved in the slaughtering themselves, being there simply to assist. Nevertheless it is, the Brigadier admits, a grim task - and one that is now all too familiar to the soldiers of 15 NE Brigade, as well as vets, officials and farmers in the Yorkshire Dales.

"It is a very unpleasant environment. You might have a pile of cattle over five years old, a pile of cattle under five, and a pile of sheep and lambs. Just standing around supervising the slaughter and putting them into trucks is grim.

"It's pretty traumatic for the farmers as well. It's not just the slaughtering, it's having that emotional interaction with the farmers. It is a complex, emotional and unpleasant operation and the guys have stood up to it very well. The guys on the ground are doing as good a job as anybody could do."

It's not only farmers who have cause to be grateful for those efforts. Nobody wants foot and mouth on their doorstep - not least because of the problems of disposing of thousands of slaughtered carcasses. The images of funeral pyres and mass burial sites in Cumbria will not easily be forgotten.

The preferred option for disposal of carcasses, the Brigadier stresses, is rendering, in which slaughtered livestock are taken away in sealed lorries for rendering down at special plants. Slaughtered livestock from the North Yorkshire area are being taken to rendering plants in Bradford and Widnes.

As things stand, the Brigadier says, there is sufficient rendering capacity to deal with slaughtered carcasses from North Yorkshire. Only if the disease spread rapidly would alternative methods of disposal need to be considered.

The first of those would be burning. There is an 'air curtain destructor' - essentially a giant incinerator which allows very little pollution to leak out - near Catterick, which could be quickly brought into use. Only once the incinerator could no longer cope would burial be considered, he says.

He won't say where the possible burial sites in the region are - not because the military is "trying to roll people over", he says, but because if they are needed, they'll be needed quickly. Nobody wants a mass burial site on their backdoor, I point out. "Of course," the former Pocklington schoolboy agrees. "There is no health hazard, but it is unpleasant." But sites have been carefully chosen to be as far from centres of population as possible, and so that there would be no risk of groundwater becoming contaminated. And they would, he stresses again, be used only as a last resort.

With the number of foot and mouth cases in the area apparently on the increase, it seems an odd time for local authorities to be considering opening footpaths, I point out. Does he agree?

The Brigadier refuses to be drawn, saying only it's a matter for local government and that he understands the pressure on authorities to open footpaths, especially with the summer approaching.But he does have words of advice to walkers using footpaths - even in areas that seem disease-free. Please, he says, be careful and take every precaution to help prevent spread of the disease.

"If you're walking on a road on the moors which is open to animals and you come to a disinfected footpath, make sure you scrub your boots scrupulously, and don't just think it will be all right."

It sounds like good advice.

Updated: 10:58 Thursday, June 14, 2001