Thursday 18 May 2017

Has Northdown Road changed in the last few years, Manston Airport related deaths and diseases and Another sketch started in Margate.

The latest bit of Manston Airport DCO, cpo news, see https://theisleofthanetnews.com/a-report-for-the-firm-hoping-to-reopen-manston-airport-as-a-cargo-hub-claims-it-will-create-30000-jobs-in-20-years/ et al, produced the usual flurry of posts on the likely Manston groups.

The source of this news is the press release from whatever RiverOak is calling itself at the moment, here is the link http://www.rsp.co.uk/blog/post/riveroak-strategic-partners-plans-for-manston-set-to-create-almost-30-000-jobs-in-thanet

They seem to be saying that their plans to use CPO powers to get the government to compulsorily purchase it from the current owners, who want to put a mixed housing and light industrial development on the site will employ 3,000 people in Thanet.

The current owners website is http://www.stonehillpark.co.uk/


I think the key quote from this report is “Direct on-site jobs are predicted to be 2,150 by year            5…”

As regular readers will know my main concern over the DCO is that since Manston Airport closed science has moved the goalposts over particulate pollution which is why the government is considering a diesel car scrappage scheme.

Jet engine fuel is much worse than diesel fuel on the particulate pollution front and the minimum requirement for the DCO would appear to involve the premature deaths of at least. 2,000 Thanet people.

I put the following comment on various local FaceBook groups (Save Manston Airport, Manston Pickle, We Love Ramsgate) where the news of the employment figures had been posted: “I think the main problem with any freight hub at Manston will be the recent discoveries about particulate pollution which lead to the government looking at a diesel scrappage scheme. A 747 type freight plane burns a tonne of fuel forr each ground movement and the viable threshold for a freight hub seems to be 10,000 movements a year, which means 10,000 tonnes of jet fuel burnt upwind of Ramsgate and Broadstairs. All the up to date information seems to be saying that this would reduce the life expectancy of thousands of people in both towns, i.e kill them.”

To be honest I was expecting some sort of fuss about this and probably to be removed from some of the groups. What actually happened is that either people agreed with what I said or didn’t say I was wrong.

I went on to add the Los Angeles Airport particulate pollution map with a comment along the lines of “37% increase in lung cancer for every doubling of particulates and LA started out very polluted”


What I was hoping for was that some people would contest my view that building an airfreight hub at Manston would kill at least 2,000 local people.

The two local Conservative MPs appear to be right behind burning 10,000 tonnes of jet fuel upwind of Ramsgate and Broadstairs every year, perhaps they don’t follow local social media.

Next the links to a few hundred pictures I took of Northdown Road in Cliftonville Margate in 2009, this is part of the work I am doing to some of my older webpages that got messed up some time ago and I am now sorting out and putting back on the www.






This is very much the pictures tell the story of the demise of a major local shopping street,

On to Margate and Turner Contemporary where the main galleries are closed because they are changing over exhibitions, of course if you paint things from life the café there is always one of the best places to do it from if the weather is being British.




3 comments:

  1. OK, Michael. I enjoy your pictures. So in these circumstances it is only fair that I accede to your request for people to contest your views. OK, I contest! There that's one click.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael, Here is another click for you. I really do believe that Northdown Road is improving albeit very slightly. The desire is there, but the need is scant. I can remember it as a fine shopping road with the likes of Bobby's and more. I truly believe that Northdown Road can be restored to its former glory. Providing there is much more employment in our area generating money to spend in the shops. Now here's the rub. A Cargo Hub would do this. But you are fighting against that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. John this business of the particulate pollution and the effect of ground movements burning 10,000 tones of jet engine fuel predominantly upwind of Broadstairs is really a very new one, that has come up since the airport closed.

    I have asked a fair amount of airport supporters I know what they make of it online and off, so far no one seems to have found any holes in my reasoning that it would kill several thousand local people.

    I sort of get the feeling that there must be some error in my reasoning, it just seems to drastic, so please have a good look at the issue yourself and see if you can spot the flaw.

    I think my stance on the airport is probably the best documented of any local, as you know it’s all published here, years of it.

    My stance is that any local commercial or industrial activity should be environmentally compliant and that any harm done to local people in terms of environmental damage should be at least counterbalanced by the economic advantages.

    At the moment my contention is roughly that the freight hub would kill about 800 Broadstairs residents, if your answer “click” was supposed to be a link to a counter argument, then the link failed to open.

    On the Northdown Road front I think you are right and that there is a small but noticeable improvement from eight years ago, if I get a chance I will photograph it again.

    ReplyDelete

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.