Wednesday, 30 April 2008

What are you drinking the water or the wave?

Click on the picture to enlarge
Manston airfield, and the agricultural land around it doubles as our drinking water reservoir, you can’t see the water because of geology, the chalk underneath the ground acts as enormous sponge. Not only does this sponge collect the rain water that falls on the land above but our water is pumped there from other sources for storage.

In recent years there have been pollution problems both with oil and fuel from the airport and fertiliser used on the farmland, now the Chinese want to build a huge factory complex on top of this, our drinking water reservoir.

Understandably some people are unhappy about the idea and most of the comment blogwise is going on at Thanet Strife, link on the sidebar, however I thought that this was such an important issue that I should put up a post and add a few thoughts.

There is an added consideration that the Chinese, like any other large employer, take Nissan for example, can simply go elsewhere in the EU, whenever they wish, leaving much of the Western side of Thanet concreted over. If that happens, then it’s easy to imagine a rapid change from industrial to residential development.

So, perhaps we should “Beware of Chinese bearing gifts” as we look for a short term economic gain for Thanet without considering the longer term risks to our quality of life. Jobs at any cost may not be the best solution. What do you think?

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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousApril 30, 2008 1:47 pm

    We need more people to read and understand this. It is an awful idea but a lone voice needs companion voices.

    ReplyDelete

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.