I have published the charts of Thanet ground water quality on one of my websites for anyone that wishes to look at them.It is a rather unusual web file due to the complex nature of the original document and the large size of it.
You need to use the arrows bottom left to move the tabs along the bottom that show the individual chemicals, clicking on the tabs then reveals the chart for each chemical.
You have to appreciate that this cocktail of chemicals is scrubbed out by reverse osmosis at Fleet reservoir (Nr Manston Airport) by Southern Water, the result is then diluted with water piped in from outside Thanet until drinkable quality is reached.
Thanet's potable (drinkable) water is blend of water from Plucks gutter (river Stour), the Thanet Aquifers and from Wingham Well.
My main concern here is the unregulated agricultural boreholes used for irrigation and crop washing.
Click here for the charts
Click here for some other document about local water that may be of interest
I'm interested in the "claim" that they are filtering out these chemicals using reverse osmosis. If you do this, the water that doesn't pass through the filter is retained and contains even higher levels of the pollutants. What do they do with this water? If they are throwing it away this would be a colossal waste and would drive up the cost of our water enormously. In effect they would be discharging a high percentage of the contaminated water they have abstracted from the aquifer.
ReplyDeleteReverse osmosis is very expensive anyway. It can be used to desalinate seawater. The reason this isn't done in this country is the cost. Normally, in the UK, reverse osmosis is only used to produce purified drinking water. You can buy a unit to go under your sink. It would be incredibly expensive to use it to purify the entire water supply. Are they seriously telling us that this is what they are doing, or is this just a piece of techno-babble to try to pacify the troublemakers?
I strongly suspect that the major element of truth is the bit where they tell us they are diluting the polluted water with less polluted water to bring the levels of the pollutants just below the acceptable threshold. I think I'd rather be drinking the less polluted stuff, thank you.
I wonder if anyone is legally accountable for failing to adequately monitor industrial activities, failing to ensure that spillages were cleaned up at the time of the spill, failing to inform the public of the danger and ultimately contaminating the aquifer. It sounds like the sort of thing that people get paid lots of money to take responsibility for. Perhaps it's time the people who've been taking the money stepped up to the plate.
It may be worth recalling that Sericol chose to have their lawyers present when they first reported their discovery of cyclohexanone leakage, over decades, into the aquifer.
ReplyDeleteMens Rea and all that.
Let's promote proper research into consequences and appropriate care asa priority now