Saturday ramble mostly about seawater quality

My bookshop today falls into the fairly busy category, that is not really busy enough to occupy me all the time but busy enough to prevent me from getting on with anything useful

I am trying to get back into drawing a likeness, not the easiest thing to do I have just had a go a Nick Clegg with disastrous results as you see, he is a bit short on features and tends to look fairly different depending on what expression he is pulling.

The main local matter that seems to be highlighted on the internet and in the news is the sewage discharge in Thanet, like most of the civilised world the disposal of sewage here is not without difficulties and even when everything is working properly Thanet’s main sewage works Wetherlys doesn’t completely clean the water.

You certainly wouldn’t want to drink the – what’s the word here – purified, perhaps not, treated water that is discharged into the sea a few hundred yards from Walpole bay.

Things are a lot better than they were on the sewage front, before about 1830 we used to let the liquid part of sewage soak into the ground, the solid part being used for fertiliser. As we dug drinking water wells near to the soakaways this lead to disease.

Industry particularly tanneries used human and animal excrement as part of the tanning process and the poor used to sell their urine, leading to expression, piss poor. The very poor were not able to do this, leading to the expression, so poor they’ve not got a pot to piss in.

From about 1830 the Thanet towns started to get their first sewage systems, the sewage was discharged raw into the sea from long outfall pipes adjacent to the main towns.

Now of course most of our sewage is processed at Wetherlys and the processed sewage is discharged into the sea via a long outfall pipe.

The Environment Agency licences Southern Water to discharge some chemicals into the sea there and some of these chemicals are harmful pollutants, the idea being that the sea dilutes and disperses them.

This is what was discharged into the sea there in 2011, I have the figures for the previous 10 years, but not those for 2012 yet.

These amounts are within the Environment Agency’s discharge consent licence and frankly within the current financial and technical limitations they are necessary discharges to run Thanet’s sewage works.

In simple terms, this goes in the sea or the Thanet towns fill up with sewage.    

Total released

Ammonia 1630kg -

penta-, octa- and deca- BDE <.1kg -

Arsenic 12.3kg -

Cadmium  <1kg comment-1kg--="" nbsp="">

Chloroform (Trichloromethane) <5kg comment-5kg--="" nbsp="">

Chromium <20kg kg--="" nbsp="">

Copper 153kg -

Lead <20kg comment-20kg--="" nbsp="">

Mercury .15kg -

Methylene chloride <10kg comment-10kg--="" nbsp="">

Nickel  <20kg font="" nbsp="">

Zinc Sea 216kg -

Cyanides - as CN <50kg comment-50kg--="" nbsp="">

Chlorides - as Cl  <2000t comment-2000t--="" nbsp="">

Fluorides - as F  <2000kg comment-2000kg--="" d="">

Phenols - total as C  

Permethrin  4.96g -

Nonylphenols 1.38kg -

Nonylphenol ethoxylates Sea 29kg -

Octylphenols  <1kg comment-1kg--="" nbsp="">

Tributyltin compounds .02kg -

tert-Butyl methyl ther (MTBE)  <1kg comment-1kg--="" nbsp="">

Propetamphos  .02kg -

Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP)  .12kg -

Bisphenol-A  .55kg -

DEHP  59kg -

Diuron  1.05kg -

Halogenated organic compounds <1000kg comment-1000kg--="" d="">

Nitrogen - as total N  159000kg -

Phosphorus - as total P  25400kg -

Total organic carbon (TOC) <50000kg comment-50000kg--="" nbsp="">

Anthracene  .12kg -

Clotrimazole .15kg -

Triclosan  1.37kg -

Asbestos  .61kg -

Aniline (Benzeneamine)  <1kg font="" nbsp="">