Campaigners are seeking answers from politicians and HS2 Ltd as more horrifying details emerge from the environmental statement.

And anger is growing in Ickenham and Harefield not just at the timing of the vast statement – published in November with an eight-week consultation period that ran through Christmas – but at details that campaigners claim were either not included in the draft statement of last spring nor discussed in community forums, or that are now revealed in their true magnitude.

They cover construction compounds, traffic and pollution, but key among them is the dumping of tunnelling waste in fields next to Harvil Road and Breakspear Road.

Campaigners who have been going through the environmental statement for the past six weeks now point out that this area is the single largest recipient of spoil in all of phase one of the project.

A table in the 'route wide effects' document – one of several large documents that have to be scrutinised in tandem to understand the full impact of HS2 – shows how the Ickenham-Harefield border area green belt is in line for more excavated material than anywhere else.

Dubbed 'sustainable placement' by the company, to be placed in three Sustainable Placement Areas, or SPAs, Ickenham-Harefield has been designated 'SPA1' – and 2.88million tonnes of waste is on its way. South Heath near Great Missenden, Bucks, and Calvert, north of Aylesbury, are the other two. Neither of those is being asked to take as much as the Hillingdon borough dump.

The Bucks dumps' total tonnage, 3.97m, means that our area – picked for its 'suitability' according to HS2 – must shoulder more than a third of all excavated spoil for the London-Birmingham stretch.

HS2 says by using the spoil in this way, 90 per cent of it will be employed as 'landscaping' rather than going to landfill, and it argues, just as it argues with woodland loss, that impacts will be more than reversed once construction is over, through planting and landscaping.

In places, the spoil will be piled three metres high, resulting in 'significant permanent changes to the landscape character and visual quality of the area', according to the report, which also states: "The sides of the sustainable placement area will be designed to tie into the existing landform. On completion, hedgerows will be replanted on their existing alignments and the land returned to agriculture."

Excavated material will be removed from the Northolt tunnel via the Ickenham portal, close to West Ruislip station. A conveyor belt working 24 hours a day will move it to a work compound where it will be loaded on to lorries for placement locally or taken elsewhere by rail, via the temporary railhead close to Hoylake Crescent, Ickenham.

Doreen McIntyre of Harefield Against HS2 says dumping spoil undermines the hard-won benefits of a tunnel that campaigners battled so long to secure to at least offest some of the impact of the line, but makes the bitter pill of the refusal by the Government of extending the tunnel beyond Harefield, to avoid some of the ravages of the Colne Valley, even harder to swallow.

"This major landscape alteration makes it a triple whammy for us. Salt in the 'no tunnel' wound," she said.

Lorries will still need to move the muck between compounds and dumping areas, and Harvil Road and Breakspear Road will bear the brunt.

On Friday, she and other HAHS2 committee members will meet MP Nick Hurd, whose constituency includes the village.

"We want to make sure Nick clearly understands just how hard it has been to participate in the ES consultation, to show him some of the horrors we have found in it and to learn what he has found in his own reading of the HS2 documents," said Mrs McIntyre.

Brian Adams of Ickenham Residents' Association, another one who has been poring over the documents for weeks, has written to HS2 Ltd this week, berating it for issues he says were omitted from community forum meetings for the South Ruislip-Ickenham stretch. 

"Everything written in these documents demonstrates once again that HS2 has no respect for the Ickenham community," he wrote.

"You have constantly refused to hold consultation events convenient to our community and your organisation (paid for by us the taxpayers) is not even willing to have events for this consultation.

"You are leaving it to local voluntary organisations like us to have to inform our communities."

HS2 points out the consultation period was set by Parliament, and says there has in effect been more than 18 months of consultation because of the draft EIS and the appraisal of sustainability in 2011. It also says becase the report is broken up into geographical sectors, it represents a much smaller number of pages to read.

Campaigners are to hold a series of drop-in meetings at Ruislip library from 11am-2pm on January 17; Ickenham library from 11am-2pm on January 21 and every Saturday from 10am-noon at Harefield library.

Visitors will be encouraged to take part in the consultation, which ends on January 24, and to sign up as 'street champions' to help co-ordinate the response across the area.

Picture: A map showing the vast 'Sustainable Placement Area' between Harvil Road and Breakspear Road South, close to Ickenham.