Let us for a moment assume that China Gateway gets its planning permission and in a few years time is a thriving manufacturing base, in the heart of Thanet’s agricultural land.Thousands of lorries will be taking away the manufactured products and delivering the raw materials used in manufacturing them. Some of those raw materials will be the deadly poisons used in many manufacturing processes, and the lorries will be coming from countries all over the world.
Now let us assume sooner or later there is a spillage of poison in one of the lorry parks which goes into the drain.
With one system this is via the interceptors into a soakaway, (the interceptors are traps to remove oil spillage and work on the fact that oil is lighter than water) the poison goes into the aquifer.
With another system this goes via interceptors into the mains drainage, there is a problem here that the water has to be pumped uphill to get it into the main drain. So we have a major storm lightening strikes an electric cable, the lights go out a tanker backs into something, as the electric pump won’t be working because of the power cut, the poison goes straight in the aquifer.
With the system demanded for all of the other businesses there, the poison goes via interceptors and is fed by gravity into ponds, the wildlife in the ponds dies alerting the people managing them that there has been a poison spillage, the poison is pumped out and disposed of safely. As you see this system isn’t reliant on the lorry driver reporting the spillage or the electricity supply.
O.K. the water gets into the aquifer, the lorry driver doesn’t report the incident, but as Southern Water test our drinking water the poison probably won’t get into the water supply and be coming out of our taps.
We have to put up with a greatly reduced water supply and a much higher price, a disaster but not a catastrophe.
End of problem, well not quite the whole of the aquifer is dotted with boreholes for agricultural irrigation and crop washing, the water from these boreholes is seldom tested and the testing is not regulated by the environment agency. Not only is our agriculture including Thanet Earth reliant on the water from these boreholes, but if the poison reaches one first (before the Southern water extraction point) and your food is washed with it, the poison enters you. As the amount of a lethal dose of some poisons used in industry is measured in fractions of parts per million this may well be the last problem you have.
I suppose that there must be people who think that the existing plans should be passed, I don’t seem to be meeting any in the bookshop, if you happen to be one I would appreciate it if you could explain anything that you think is wrong with my reasoning here. At the moment the recommendation to approve seems to be going for the pumping uphill option, perhaps you consider this to be a reasonable risk, I wonder will greengrocers have to label food “not grown in Thanet” in order to sell it.
The picture shows Hypnos, Greek god of sleep, and his brother, Thanatos, god of death, as painted by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917).
“Thanet” thought to be derived from Thanatos or Thanatus the Greek god or daimon of non-violent death.
In the BBC programme on the Gateway tonight, Ken Wills said quite clearly that Tory Councillors Ezekiel and Latchford WERE "hosted" by CGP during their visit to China earlier this year. This flatly contradicts the two Tories' versions of events.
ReplyDeleteNo more need for leaked documents therefore.
Will this affect the police investigation? Will the truth come out into the open at last, perhaps at tomorrow night's Council meeting?
In the BBC programme on the Gateway tonight, Ken Wills said quite clearly that Tory Councillors Ezekiel and Latchford WERE "hosted" by CGP during their visit to China earlier this year. This flatly contradicts the two Tories' versions of events.
ReplyDeleteNo more need for leaked documents therefore.
Will this affect the police investigation? Will the truth come out into the open at last, perhaps at tomorrow night's Council meeting?
Michael, Any reputable company would be carrying out a risk assessment using ALARP or "as low as reasonably possible" This means that all dangers should be identified and the risks reduced until negligible or too expensive to continue. At this point the operation should find another way to carry on or stop. I think the dangers you describe could be minimised to an acceptable level with the right checks in place ie routine HSE audits. But, as the banking fiasco shows, we don`t seem to be very good anymore at making sure systems run properly in this co8untry. Maybe that is everyone`s problem - nobody trusts anyone to deliver what they promise.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I would be surprised if TDC does not approve the application tomorrow night. In planning terms there is not a lot to refuse. (Doug Brown - planning officer TDC - has said that Ken Wills has been told that his company is unlikely to receive planning approval for phase 2 & 3 which sits on farm land.)
Besides all that, the noisey opponents are representative of about 200 people, the rest of the residents (140,000) want the jobs and the money
ReplyDeleteThere are only 2,500 without work in Thanet, so why should you clainm that 140,000 want this scheme? Yet another CGP apologist or 'bung' taker speaking here? Of those 2,500 how many are quite happy with their state? History in Thanet would indicate a hard-core of unemployed and happy to be so. You yet again, as last night, fail to make an argument that is valid or remotely credible to counter what Michael is sayng here.
ReplyDeleteJohn I think the problem here is that we already have experience of the architect’s competence with the Pleasurama project, bumbling along without the flood risk assessment strongly recommended by the EA. That combined with the lack of experience of both the architect and CGP, I think if they want to proceed with plans that are far less cautious in terms of protecting the water supply, we need some experienced input.
ReplyDelete22.36 I am not arguing here against jobs for Thanet, if the aquifer is permanently damaged, much of our agriculture including Thanet Earth won’t be viable, so we are looking here at risking real jobs for potential perceived jobs. The employment figures produced by the architect don’t tally with the type of building proposed, or the fact that this is most likely to be a warehousing and distribution hub without much manufacturing. Now if it is distribution and not manufacturing it’s less risky in terms of people being poisoned but there are far fewer jobs involved. Warehousing today is very automated, and moving more in that direction all the time, we have had warehouses where there are no people inside, just computer controlled machinery moving the goods about, for more than 20 years. The problem though is that the eventual use of the buildings isn’t certain, so the risks and gains are uncertain, it is in fact a gamble and the odds don’t look good enough.
Ken Wills said on last nights inside out program that all three phases were essential to the project, so we are gambling with a considerable amount of our farmland as well as our water supply. Neither do I think it will stop at phases 1 2 and 3 and of course if the aquifer is damaged then the agricultural land here in Thanet wouldn’t be much use without water.
To have an industrial area that’s expansion would directly benefit from a pollution incident doesn’t sound to good to me.