I got a short walk yesterday afternoon and one this morning, a point of note here is that the chap hauling up buckets of cement and concrete to the man up the scaffolding building the blockwork, that is the part of the Wellington Crescent cliff façade, is wearing a hard hat, the chap up the scaffolding laying the blocks isn’tIt’s a bit hard to tell how my intervention in this would have gone down, by this I mean did it make them resentful, or do they see it as a move that may eventually save one of them them from death or injury.
Of course the real problem here is the long term one that this appears much more about covering up the defects as quickly as possible, rather than really addressing the problem of the cliff façade safety.
There is also the problem of the million pounds of our – the council taxpayers money – being spent on a job that was obviously faulty and the council instead of seeking redress both from the firm that was supposed to be supervising the work and the firm that did the work, at the very least they must have known of the existence of the bulge and the crack that it caused as they filled the crack with cement before they painted the blockwork.
So much today seems to be about going to any lengths to avoid admitting that people make mistakes, as human error is part of human nature this is all a bit of a waste of time really.
No problem photographing in Ramsgate of course and I am still having an ongoing dialogue with The Westwood Cross people about why I was refused permission to photograph there, so far I am none the wiser.
Click on the link for the pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts110/id14.htm
Michael, the following is from the website of the company who performed the £1,000,000 worth of work;
ReplyDelete"Wellington Crescent, Ramsgate
Repairs to cliff facade enhancing the upper retaining wall, new pedestrian guard rails and barriers, installation of new drainage system, surfacing works to the upper footway"
Does this description make you feel safe in the knowledge that the load bearing elements of the wall have been looked at?
Does it sound like a million quids worth of work?
That seems a devastating quote. Looking forward to Michael's response.
ReplyDeleteWell Richard Samuels and TDC like wasting a million quid, they have done that on additional pension payments and compromise agreements for directors (4)and other officers (3) over the last few years.
ReplyDelete12.24 sorry about the delay replying, I contacted them and asked them why they had done the work on a structure without adequate foundations and why the had just filled the crack in the bulge and painted the bulging bit?
ReplyDeleteThere answer was that that they had just fulfilled the contract requested by TDC and TDCs consultants who had done the original survey.
I don’t think it is a job that they are particularly proud of and they were very reluctant to discuss it with me at all.
When considering the wall it is important to understand that it is the cliff that holds the wall up and not the other way round. The wall being intended to prevent weathering of the chalk and having no support function.
One argument put to me by the councils consultants about the foundations is that they must be adequate because the wall hasn’t subsided. Looking at the original design drawings the wall slopes in and at intervals up the cliff is stepped so it would appear that the wall is hanging on the cliff.
To be perfectly honest the more I find out about the structure the less I like going down there, oddly enough I feel fine walking on the nice new smooth footpath on top of the cliff.
I think somewhere along the line people have forgotten that this is just an unsupported chalk cliff about seventy feet high, if you took the things that hide its defects away, the concrete wall on the front and the nice smooth tarmac path on top, you wouldn’t hang about near the bottom or the edge at the top.