Sunday Ramble, reflections on why the council would risk people’s lives, some pictures and so on

Cliff

I think it is fair to say that the cliff façade behind the Pleasurama site where they have started building The Royal Sands development in Ramsgate is a dangerous structure. I don’t think I will sleep too well until they have cordoned off the part of the cliff top path above where the foundations of the cliff wall have been undermined.

I will contact the HSE on Monday, as they sent me pictures of the foundations that don’t exist only last week, I expect them to act pretty promptly. I haven’t contacted the media yet, something that is all a bit tedious if anyone else wants to, please do.

I suppose the next problem will be where does the money come from to make the cliff safe, I would think this will be in the order of tens of millions. Unfortunately Thanet District Council have gone down a road where all of the responsibility for the cliff façade structure is theirs.

I don’t think there is an easy way back to just having a cliff of the normal, don’t sit under it standard of most of the Thanet cliffs, I don’t know if they will be able to underpin it now so much chalk has been removed, as I think it would be difficult to protect the workers doing the underpinning.

Having been down at the bottom of the cliff there yesterday I can assure you it is not a pleasant experience.

At the moment the only people who have responded to me are in agreement that there are no foundations where there should be foundations and that includes Kent Fire and Rescue who say that they don’t have the power to close the footpath until the council’s engineer says that a concrete cliff façade weighing thousands of tons that has no foundation is a dangerous structure. This I presume is the same engineer that ignored my concerns about the lack of foundations when the £1m contract started and went on to sign the contract off.

If you don’t understand what I am talking about there see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/04/pleasurama-royal-sands-development_09.html

Pictures

Here are the links to the pages of pictures that I took today

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbok411/id5.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbok411/id6.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbok411/id7.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/netbok411/id8.htm

China Gateway

Here is the link to the China Gateway website http://www.cgiplc.com/  this company used to be Commercial Group Properties the link on their website to “Real Time Stocks” their share price doesn’t work. Their shares are at 10.25p at the time of writing, a long way from the price when the first started trading and bought a lot of land at Manston.

I think that the main problem they face at the moment is the environmental constraints related to the Manston site, most particularly the drainage, from what I can understand of the new documents that appeared on the councils planning website http://www.ukplanning.com/thanet  planning reference F/TH/08/0400 they have just made a start on this.

There is some information about the Manston environmental constraints here http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/drink/id13.htm  with the problem of Pfizer right on our doorstep, taking Greenfield sites and converting them to industrial sites without first using the redundant industrial land has pretty obvious disadvantages.

With the elections in the offing I wonder if the china gateway people will once again be offering donations to the political parties and taking the councillors on trips to China. At the moment there isn’t a Tesco carrier bag in site see http://eastcliffrichard.blogspot.com/search/label/%27ello%20me%20old%20china

Thanet District Council’s unfortunate enthusiasms

With China Gateway where the initial assumptions seemed to be that the council would rubber stamp the Chinese companies discharging contaminated water into our drinking water. Pleasurama where the council seem to have been right behind a development built against basic safety advice from the environment agency and seem to have been turning a blind eye to cliff safety. The airport where the council seem to have failed to enforce various environmental regulations for years. I am beginning to wonder what sort of company would want to move to Thanet. It would be nice to think that the council would come down firmly on environmental and safety issues without people pressuring them into doing so.

In Europe now I think most reputable companies would see a quality water supply and safe cliffs and basic environmental standards as the minimum requirement to moving here.



I will ramble on as the mood takes me.