Thanet bathing water quality figures

As our antipodean cousins would say, “If you don’t pee in our swimming pool, we won’t swim in your toilet.”

2015: excellent Ramsgate Sands Thanet

2015: excellent Ramsgate Western Undercliffe Thanet

2015: excellent Botany Bay, Broadstairs Thanet

2015: excellent Broadstairs, Stone Bay Thanet

2015: sufficient Broadstairs, Viking Bay Thanet

2015: excellent Joss Bay, Broadstairs Thanet

2015: good Margate Fulsam Rock Thanet

2015: good Margate The Bay Thanet

2015: excellent Minnis Bay, Birchington Thanet

2015: excellent St Mildred's Bay, Westgate Thanet

2015: poor Walpole Bay, Margate Thanet

2015: excellent West Bay, Westgate Thanet

2015: good Westbrook Bay, Margate Thanet

As I guess we all know the great big Thanet toilet pipe comes out just upwind from Walpole Bay, figures are as expected, here is the link to the whole document.

The picture (paining at the top) is of the beach by the old swimming pool, the place I last bunged a dinghy in. Yea I know it’s supposed to be for jet skies, but they gotta catch you at it. 

We have been a bit busy with the bookshop over the last few days, click on the link to see the incredible amount of books that have gone out on the shelves http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/

Sheila says the last lot of actual annual discharge figures she can find for the big sewage pipe are the 2012 figures, year on year there isn't much to chose between them.

Substance
Release environment Total released Notifiable releases
penta-, octa- and deca- BDE Sea .1kg -
Ammonia Sea 1930kg -
Triclosan Sea 1.56kg -
Clotrimazole Sea .15kg -
Anthracene Sea .14kg -
Total organic carbon (TOC) Sea <50000kg kg--="" nbsp="">

-Phosphorus - as total P Sea 28800kg -
Nitrogen - as total N Sea 181000kg -
Halogenated organic ompounds Sea <1000kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Diuron Sea 1.05kg -
DEHP Sea 59kg -
Bisphenol-A Sea .55kg -
Dioxins and furans- as WHO TEQ Sea <.0001kg -
Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP) Sea .12kg -
Propetamphos Sea .02kg -
tert-Butyl methyl ther (MTBE) Sea <1kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Tributyltin compounds Sea .02kg -
Octylphenols Sea <1kg c="" kg--="">
-Nonylphenol ethoxylates Sea 32.9kg -
Nonylphenols Sea 1.56kg -
Permethrin Sea 4.96g -
Phenols - total as C Sea <20kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Fluorides - as F Sea <2000kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Chlorides - as Cl Sea <2000t nbsp="" t--="">
-Cyanides - as CN Sea <50kg c="" kg--="">
-Zinc Sea 212kg -
Nickel Sea <20kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Methylene chloride Sea <10kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Mercury Sea .15kg -
Lead Sea <20kg kg--="">
-Copper Sea 141kg -
Chromium Sea <20kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Chloroform (Trichloromethane) Sea <5kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Cadmium Sea <1kg kg--="" nbsp="">
-Arsenic Sea 12.3kg -
Aniline (Benzeneamine) Sea <1kg c="" kg--="">
-Asbestos Sea .7kg -

and she will be coming up over to swim in our toilet when our water warms up.

Ed. sorry my knickers line is showing with escaped nbsps I last did a computer course in 1970 and obviously need to go back for a refresher. 

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="">

Thanet District Councillors on the Weed.

Two of our senior councillors posting about seaweed and pollution in two days, see Clive Hart at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/11/walpole-bay-water-quality.html and Simon Moores at http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/11/walpole-bay-water-mystery.html seemed a bit excessive so I thought I had better look into the issue.

Above are the bathing water quality figures for Walpole Bay, what the Environment Agency is measuring here in simple terms is the amount of poo in the sea. If I put my science hat on for a moment I would call it, faecal coliforms and faecal streptococci, although this sounds pretty nasty, faecal coliforms and faecal streptococci, are not actually harmful. They are just bacteria that live in human and animal poo and their presence in sufficient quantities in seawater tells us that there has been a sewage discharge nearby.

Swimming in diluted sewage is harmful, so you would think that there would be effective measures in place to stop this from happening. Here in Thanet we have three ways of knowing when there is sewage in the sea, listed below.

1 Weekly seawater tests, the results of which are shown in the table above. I think it fair to say that these tests would only show significant problems if conducted within a day or two after a sewage discharge. So if a test is conducted on Mondays then only discharges made on Saturday, Sunday and Monday before the test would be likely to show up.

As these tests take several days to perform because the bacteria has to have time to grow, they can only be used as a general indicator of bathing water quality throughout the bathing season. They would for instance show if there was a significant discharge coming from a source that the EA, council and Southern Water didn’t know about. What they wouldn’t do is to tell you if there was sewage in the sea on any given day.

2 The emergency sewage discharges made by Southern Water. These are either due to equipment failure, in simple terms, when the pump breaks down so they can’t pump the sewage to the sewage works, they send it down a pipe into the sea. Or they are due to heavy rain, which in many cases goes down the same drains as the sewage and if the rain produces more water than the system can cope with, they send it down a pipe into the sea.

The problem here is that there is no proper communication between the council and Southern Water, so although Southern Water know when they have sent sewage down the pipe into sea, somewhere along the line this doesn’t get as far as a chap from the council going and pulling down the blue flag and putting up a brown one.

3 Common sense, if we have had exceptionally heavy rain then there is likely to be sewage in the sea for a day or so afterwards.  

The seaweed is a different issue altogether, the basic rule here is that it is more likely to be dangerous to smell rotting seaweed than to swim in the sea near it, the rotting seaweed for instance that smells like rotten eggs is likely to be giving off hydrogen sulphide, a gas that in sufficient quantities can be lethal.

Like so many things in nature, we have evolved to find things that harm us repulsive and have survived by avoiding them, in simple terms, potential ancestors that liked the smell of rotting eggs probably didn’t survive to produce offspring.    


Below is a list of some of the chemicals released into the sea from the Weatherlees sewage treatment plant outfall pipe east of Walpole Bay in 2010.

Nonylphenols	Sea	1.47kg	-
Nonylphenol ethoxylates	Sea	31kg	-
Ammonia	Sea	120000kg	-
Aniline (Benzeneamine)	Sea	<1kg	-
Arsenic	Sea	12.2kg	-
Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP)	Sea	.12kg	-
Bisphenol-A	Sea	.53kg	-
Cadmium	Sea	<1kg	-
Chlorides - as Cl	Sea	<2000t	-
Chloroform (Trichloromethane)	Sea	<5kg	-
Copper	Sea	138kg	-
Cyanides - as CN	Sea	<50kg	-
DEHP	Sea	57.7kg	-
Dioxins and furans- as WHO TEQ	Sea	<0kg	-
Diuron	Sea	1.03kg	-
Fluorides - as F	Sea	<2000kg	-
Halogenated organic ompounds	Sea	<1000kg	-
Lead	Sea	<20kg	-
Total organic carbon (TOC)	Sea	<50000kg	-
Tributyltin compounds	Sea	.02kg	-
Zinc	Sea	209kg	-
Anthracene	Sea	.13kg	-
Clotrimazole	Sea	.15kg	-
Triclosan	Sea	1.47kg	-
Asbestos	Sea	.66kg	-
penta-, octa- and deca- BDE	Sea	<.1kg	-
Permethrin	Sea	4.84g	-
Phenols - total as C	Sea	<20kg	-
Phosphorus - as total P	Sea	27100kg	-
Propetamphos	Sea	.02kg	-
tert-Butyl methyl ther (MTBE)	Sea	<1kg	-
Mercury	Sea	.15kg	-
Methylene chloride	Sea	<10kg	-
Nickel	Sea	<20kg	-
Nitrogen - as total N	Sea	170000kg	-
Octylphenols	Sea	<1kg

The list above looks pretty bad I know but frankly it is typical for sewage outfall pipes thought the civilised world.

The real problem here is one of what happens when us the public have to pay for a service without any choice, in this case Southern Water and Thanet District Council, we have no option but to pay them to provide services for us. In this instance both organisations spend our money, and in terms of ticking the boxes it looks as though they have done all of the right things to ensure that we don’t wind up swimming around in sewage. But and it’s a very big but, the chain of communication between the two people actually doing a physical job of work, the engineer who discharges the sewage and logs it, and the lifeguard pulling up the blue flag, breaks down as it passes through the bureaucrats shuffling the paper in both organisations.  

The loss of several of our blue flags this year was due to water quality sampling last year, not so much that there were a few days a year when the bathing water was polluted, this is something that is going to happen pretty much everywhere in the civilised world.

What should have happened on the few days last year when emergency discharges were made was that the people involved should have been told, the council should have put up signs telling people not to bathe and of course the Environment Agency shouldn’t have take their samples on the days immediately after the discharges. 

Hello sailor, an old sea dogs thoughts on the Margate oil bunker

This is about the new oil bunkering facility in the Queens Channel around five miles north of Margate, my concerns here relate to the possibility of an oil spill off Margate.

Bunker oil is usually the term for some of the thickest and nastiest oil there is, it is the residual oil that remains after the oil distillation process that turns crude oil into, petrol diesel and lubricating oil.

It is used in ships boilers and is so viscous that it has to be heated up before it can be pumped.

As far as I can see this facility offers pretty much every sort of oil there is to vessels in the Dover Strait and Thames Estuary.

Operations there involve fuel bunker vessels being anchored in the Queens Channel and 1,000s of tons of oil being pumped between vessels.

Two tankers have been chartered for this operation, The Jamie with a load capacity of 5,775 tonnes and The Christine with a load capacity of 8,673 tonnes, these are supplied with fuel by barges from Rotterdam.

I have put the (old) press release on my press release blog at http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-english-channel-bunkers-only.html

Information about contingency plans in the event of a spillage is a bit sparse at the moment, I can’t find details of any emergency standby vessel that would be used in an emergency spill.

In the case of an oil spillage, the facility will use the dedicated oil spill response capability in the Port of Ramsgate.

On the one hand I read about the toxic chemical spill in Hungry, the BP oil spill and part of me thinks something like this is unlikely to happen in Thanet.

On the other hand I find I am writing something like this, posting about bits of masonry hanging of cliffs or local flood risk, where no one actually seems to be aware of the high tide mark.

I suppose I am writing this post with a growing sense of incredulity, thinking that I must be missing or misunderstanding something here, thinking surely people in Margate must be aware of this, the council, local press, local environmentalists.

Perhaps it’s just me and this sort of risk is perfectly normal, perhaps these sort of operations are common close to tourist beaches with busy offshore shipping and a history of large and damaging storms.

I get the impression that refuelling ships in this way is more profitable than doing so in port where the environmental risks would be less, but I do wonder what the benefits to Thanet are, as it is the Thanet tourist economy that is being put at risk.

I will add to this one as I get time.