Saturday, 24 May 2008

Something Nasty still in the water

I was quite surprised to read in yesterdays Gazette that the developers of the China Gateway intend to ignore the Environment Agency and allow the Chinese to be responsible for treating their own sewage, chemical and industrial waste. It is their intention then to pour the water that they get from their cesspits into our drinking water reservoir.

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.

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 24, 2008 2:13 pm

    Michael, The developers can 'Ignore' all they like, what they cannot do is build until they have planning consent.
    Reading 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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael ChildMay 24, 2008 3:31 pm

    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.

    In 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.

    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.