I have been a bit reluctant to post this one as in some ways as it really is an appalling reflection on the duty of care by the council.First two quotes from the environment agency, both of which I can substantiate as I have them in writing.
“There is thought to be some control over the quality of water used for irrigation and crop washing, although this is not regulated by the Environment Agency.”
“With regard to the Highways Agency - that was a quirk of the original Water Resources Act 1991. It does cause us problems to have soakaways from roads draining to the chalk. We are hoping to address this in the more vulnerable areas in the future. Any new roads built since 1992 (when the Groundwater Protection Policy came out) have been required to install interceptors and to drain the water to outside SPZ1. This has been followed on Thanet resulting in significant improvement in some areas.
We are aware that the Highways Agency is currently connected to the airport drainage system and that this drainage system does discharge direct to the Pegwell Bay. However, we have seen the planning application for the East Kent Access Road. In the plans it appeared that the section of the road currently connected into the Manston Airport drainage would be removed. We believe that the new road would be drained to ground via soakaways in areas where the groundwater is slightly less sensitive and to Pegwell Bay in areas where the groundwater is very sensitive.”
Ed. This means that some of our roadside drains lead to soakaways right next to the unmonitored boreholes. Concerned or not about local water issues I will leave you to draw your one conclusions about the safety aspect of this situation, say compared to pumping raw sewage into the sea next to a beach.
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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.