I am afraid that a lot of the blame for this appears to belong to the council and a remarkable lack of local knowledge on their part, I think the story goes like this.
When the Thanet end of the A299 was made into a duel carriageway some bright spark at the council thought it would be a good idea to earmark the farmland near the end of it for an industrial estate, because of the good road connections.
What no one noticed at the time was that it is also right on top of the underground drinking water reservoir, the big problem now is that the council would have to admit to making a mistake or we shall have the equivalent of a factory ship floating around in our drinking water, with at best a few regulations saying don’t throw anything over the side.
Michael, The developers can 'Ignore' all they like, what they cannot do is build until they have planning consent.
ReplyDeleteReading elsewhere on the blog sites I am informed that the cash for this developement will not be forthcoming without the nessesary consents from GOHSE and the DfTe
14.13 always a bit hard to say in Thanet, the architects who produced the environmental report are the same ones who produced the various crazy sets of plans for Pleasurama in Ramsgate.
ReplyDeleteIn this case the plans were so badly drawn that the EA first didn’t realise that building was at risk of flooding and then couldn’t comment properly because the couldn’t tell the baseline relative to the high tide line.
Eventually David Green managed to get the level of the baseline from them and I passed it on to the EA who then commented.
Now despite the odds, the rules and just plain common sense the builders are going ahead without implementing the EA strong recommendations for a flood and storm assessment.