Saturday 19 July 2008

Environmental considerations


Here in Thanet there are three big environmental issues, the biggest being the decision not to hold the line on the north coast Wantsum sea defences, followed by a relaxation of the regulations that protect our drinking water supplies and relatively minor in comparison the Pleasurama development.

The first could quite literally wipe a large part of southeast Kent off the map, the second could result in poisoning of our drinking water supply and the third over a thousand people being trapped between the sea and the cliff in a collapsing building.

These are all worst-case scenarios and of course with all of these issues one of my concerns is that I have misunderstood something and am engaged in unnecessary scaremongering.

For the most part all of the issues are controlled by the environment agency and until I became involved in them, I had reasonable confidence that they knew what they were doing.

Now with the China gateway development, the environment agency officer in charge of the case has admitted to me in writing, that he hadn’t read the planning application properly.

“Regrettably the level of resourcing available to assess the flood risk implications of planning applications does not permit the scrutiny of all 271 pages of the flood risk assessment appendices”

As this came from a civil servant, and they don’t normally admit things like that in writing to a member of the public, I take it as a clear signal that something has gone very wrong, it begs a very important question, which is.

“Are the officers making decisions of huge environmental impact on our future, properly qualified and resourced?”

The picture of Ramsgate harbour wall, which is made of granite and is at a higher level above sea level than Pleasurama is an indicator of what happens when we get an easterly gale combined with a high tide.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.