I have had one successful outcome from my questions to the council that is Sandy Ezekiel’s email address leader@thanet.gov.uk is to be reinstated.It’s a bit of a strange reflection on the way that the council operates that I could get it reinstated and he couldn’t, as it was the email address that he used for his official correspondence it must have been a considerable inconvenience to have it deleted.
I have also received a response to my enquiries about the Sericol leak click here to read, as it doesn’t concur exactly with the information given to me by the experts I consulted, I will have to get back to them and also may have to get more information from the council. Once I have done this I will be able to produce an informed posting about it, in the meantime click here to read the response.
(1) The facts is that there was a leak to ground of cyclohexanone over decades during which there was local water abstraction.
ReplyDelete(2) The fact is that the Chief Executive assumed responsibility for answering my further FOI requests (such as contamination incidents at Thor in which TDC yielded lead agency to govt) and I have had no reply. It is, therefore, inevitable to conclude that there is a Chief Executive and council solicitor guiding hand at work in all TDC replies.
(3) The matter at Sericol was a leak over many years. And at the rate TDC is leaking information in response to FOI requests it will be as many years, if ever, before Thanet gets anywhere near the full truth.
(4) The council have now revealed that a huge tonnage of ground was removed. Why did they not reveal that in response to the first FOI request ?
(5) My instinct is that Morgan is trying to do a proper job of specialist land contamination control but maybe swimming against the ruling clique tide. I think it may be an exercise by TDC to get the press to mistake mitigation for clarification. Smoke and mirrors. Still lots of unanswered questions including Thor.
How big was the underground storage tank?
ReplyDeleteWhen they removed the tank and pipework how much damage was discovered? It would not take a good chemical engineer long to look at the size of a hole in a tank or pipe and tell you how the rate of loss each day.
The EA letter mentions 'rectification of other poorly-contained areas of chemical use on the site'. Reading between the lines it suggests control of chemicals did not meet required standards. So what else was lost/spilled?
Michael
ReplyDeleteThe EA has been in existence for a very short time and I doubt that any scientific controls/monitoring exists to claim that they have acted in the appropriate manner or have proper documented analysis of all the bore holes in Thanet etc. The EA even failed to investigate the sudden mass cockle deaths in Pegwell Bay.
What is clear is Southern Water can close down Thanet’s bore holes and pump in water from other areas (as it does now), this effectively means that our underground aquifers can be closed permanently at any time. I wonder if this means the water rates going up and metering imposed on us.
Of greater concern is the extract (below) from a recent letter from the EA which suggests that there are more incidents that the powers that be have not let us the public know about.
“You refer in your subsequent e-mail of 21 October to an alleged mis-match between pollution incidents and the detail contained on our website. There are a number of on-going incidents as they have been known about for some time and are being properly dealt with and monitored.
Whilst it takes time for new data and information to be transposed onto our website, all pollution incidents are monitored until their impact on people or the environment has been reduced to an appropriate level”
Note that the EA do not indicate exactly how many incidents have taken place, nor do they indicate why it has taken nearly 10 years to deal with the Manston discharge consent. To make matters worse the EA do not indicate how they are dealing with diffuse pollution.
I find it rather strange that there is a massive amount of chemical pollutants in the underground aquifers yet the EA have a fixation with Nitrates and are not dealing with the question “how are the chemicals getting into the system”.
What we now require is a full inquiry regarding water/aquifers and Thanet’s environment and a better input for the Local Plan ‘Core Strategy’ especially under the tag of ‘Cumulative Impact’- and without any planning/political bias?
For the record TDC closed down an aquifer in the Westwood Cross area, why? The EA have stated that this Sericol leak did not affect any where else, yet the Ground Water Quality charts tell another story, oh and of course diffuse pollution...
Malcolm Kirkaldie
As I said in the posting I will do a more detailed post about this when I have more information, this is just to reply to comments where I can.
ReplyDeleteRick is appears that 1,000s of tons of ground dug up contained a lot of different chemicals.
20.35 I believe the problem in ascertaining how much was spilt is that no one knows when the leak started, I would also imagine that it got progressively worse over the years, probably the fuller the tank the greater the pressure and hence more flow for a given size hole is a factor too.
I am getting a picture of the council being so worried about maintaining employment in the area that they have been very lax over controlling industrial pollution.
I believe that this has backfired, in as much as many of our sites are very expensive to clean up, making it difficult and expensive to reuse them when one industry closes and another wants to open.
Malcolm I am becoming increasingly concerned about the way in which the environment agency operates and get the feeling this is not always in the best interests of the environment.
They tell me that closing the aquifer is not an option, at the moment we don’t have sufficient capacity to get all of our water for the public water supply from outside Thanet, let alone our agricultural and industrial needs.
I believe there to be about 50 ongoing pollution incidents at the moment, it’s all a bit of a can of worms when you take the lid off, obviously TDC can’t publicise cases that have been reported but not enforced.
TDC tell me that in the case of cyclohexanone that one can smell it at lower concentrations than it is thought to harmful at, which is an interesting point.
I think the fault is thought to have been from the installation of the pipe. Hence three decades or more of continuous leakage.
ReplyDeletePressure tests held and it was vacuum test that revealed the problem. Excuse me as an engineer, not scientist, but if the vacuum could not be held then something moved in to occupy it ?
That would be air ?
And hence the leak must have been able to vent to atmosphere and this would appear to invalidate one of the TDC claims.
Malcolm ... It is good to see that you must have recovered from the soporific experience of reading my Common Law Information because it is clear that you are back on form mate.
Anon 20.35
I would imagine that the remediation recovery rate would be interacting exponential decays. One particular to the remediation procedure. And the other particular to, and informative about, the rate of absorption into aquifer. So I suspect that the EA can extrapolate the total loss and, hence, the amount which went to water supply before the abstraction was switched off.
Michael
If you happen to be emailing TDC I would be grateful if, in blogger speak, you could give a "BUMP" to the matter of Richard Samuel replying to me on the subject of Thor.
It looks as if TDC are trying to mitigate the Sericol history before themselves "Leaking" at their characteristic slow rate anything on Thor ?
A simple question. When was The Rumsfield Road extraction point closed by Southern Water and why was it closed? Mr Samuels' reply fails to make clear why it was closed and when and yet states it would not be re-opened whilst a threat existed. Could it just be possible that Southern Water was the first to detect contamination and that this led to closure at Rumsfield and investigation at Sericol?
ReplyDelete