Have you seen the Environment Agency dealing with a pollution incident in the last six months? From personal experience, I believe that they have gone Covid AWOL, and are now more concerned with deferring events onto private water companies and charities like The Canal and Rivers Trust.
As a rescuer of wildfowl for over 20 years now, I have never seen a year like it for repeat incidents of hydrocarbon pollution, of both industrial, marine craft, and unknown origin.
I detailed one such incident in February on our sister website Saveoursandwellcanadgeese.org. This was a major operation where the voluntary sector had to work beyond their means to help dozens of birds affected when they lost the ability to waterproof themselves after becoming covered in diesel. On this occasion, despite frequent calls for feedback, the EA officer failed to respond at all, and so I was left with the highly implausible explanation from Severn Trent. Have you ever seen a diesel powered motorbike? 😯
“Re: Woden Road South pool
Thank you for your email regarding the diesel spoilage into the Woden Road South pool. I was very concerned to hear about the affect this had on the birds on the lake, and can appreciate how distressing this must have been.
The area technician has advised that we had three pollutions reported to us at this location within a week. The first one was a motorbike catching fire and the diesel entering the surface water system via the road gullies. We were unable to find anything for the other two incidents, as there was no evidence of any oil.”
Further incidents have followed this at several locations, but in the loony lockdown and subsequent period of nonsense since, it appears that those answering the EA 0800 number are “working from home”. Some of the reception on these calls has been bloody awful to the point of incomprehensible. The non attendance of the EA officers at the locations also means that the polluters are winning. And there is the longstanding issue of why they are able to attend incidents involving fish deaths but not bird deaths on a lake. Wildfowl are not economically viable to the environment agency obviously. 😥
The EA have released last month their update of
State_of_the_environment_health_people_and_the_environment
and there is also their February 2018 published
State_of_the_environment_water_quality_report.
In the first report, Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency, makes the following admission,
“Too many towns and cities in England,
especially those with a strong industrial heritage, have too little green space, too few trees, culverted rivers, poor air quality and are at risk of flooding.”
But what she fails to recognise is that current Government policy of “brown field ” building is only going to make this situation even worse, with loss of green space derisively declassified as being “brownfield”. The inequalities she speaks of are those typical of middle class university educated academics who do not live or want to live in such areas. There is no “levelling up” of our areas.
As to the main findings, The agency have now been in business for 24 years, and this is a very long time in the changes of political parties and the “bonfires of quangos” that have taken place. One could say therefore that in nearly a quarter of a century, this quango has been the authority lead on these matters, so why have they failed so spectacularly to “create a better place” in that time?
Everything appears to be increasing, but talk is still cheap.
The second report gives a totally disingenuous perspective on water pollution, and the failure of the EA to stop it.
percentages always hide and distort the truth
The biggest lie in this report is made concerning water pollution incidents, where the agency use their own failed criteria of classification , which I have looked at in depth HERE. To the EA gills are good, feathers are worthless. Their claims of pollution are a lie based on fish and not of bird pollution. The fact that birds died by the pollution of sites such as at Smethwick Hall park, which has yet to be rectified by Severn Trent Water’s faecal attack in 2019 doesn’t give much confidence that things have improved since the release of this report, and that the EA’s barometer of real pollution is skewed by economics.
Bullshit- both in terms of pollutant and in the summary of methodology of compiling these figures
But quite honestly when you look at the EA regulation of waste sites such as at Rattlechain, the polluters have been winning all along from the incompetence , negligence and stupidity shown by this useless quango.
The top observations I cite as evidence for this are
- The inability of the EA to determine that the lagoon site was once a single pit and pool, AFTER waste tipping had begun. A smaller subsidiary lagoon was carved in 1961, from inside the main pit, in an effort to use this to pump water back to the canal. BUT THE EA BELIEVED THAT THIS WAS “CLEAN WATER” AND EVEN REFERRED TO IT AS THE “CLEAN” SIDE LAGOON.” One example of this can be read HERE.
- The HPA tests for Rhodia in the joke HHRA actually confirmed that for years they had been allowing a pit heavily contaminated by white phosphorus to be pumped back into controlled waters!
- Further to this from an FOI request, it is apparent that the EA could not test and did not test for white phosphorus in the water pumped to the canal.
- The EA frequently told Rhodia to “rake the sediment” below the water line, in an effort to prevent fires, as well as pointing out a string of other licence breaches, yet they were apparently unaware that this banned rat poison was systemically poisoning birds at low depths. In doing this they helped to poison the birds every time that they asked for this to be done.
- The inadequacy of EA managers and pollution control officers and knowledge in the field. One who claimed to me his university major was in zoology- “phosphine is marsh gas”– in reference to the highly toxic phosphine gas. Another who stated “phosphorus isn’t toxic, I’m a chemist, I did A-level chemistry.” NB Both of these individuals transferred from the previous Walsall Council run West Midlands hazardous waste unit.
- Inadequate advice on planning matters. When SMBC refused the application to build houses on the former sewage works site, that Severn Trent had flogged off, they partially did so on the basis that the EA would offer no opinion on the safety or future safety from the Rattlechain lagoon after or during decommissioning scenarios. If these “experts” would not give an opinion then who else in the planning authority would be able to?
Fundamentally their failure to uphold the licence conditions is what makes them a failure as a regulator, despite many breaches which were reported and directly observed.
But these scenarios appear to have started long before 1995 with the creation of this money guzzling quango, and stretch way back to events from the West Midlands County Council in issuing vague and uselessly unenforceable site licences. Many of these should never have been issued at all and probably were because of the size of some company pocket books and blank cheques to dodgy characters in governance.
Of late of course, the EA have denied us the right to find out where these sites were, and what they and those before them allowed to be dumped, in conjunction with the desire by this Government to “build, build build” rampantly on these cancerous brownfield land areas. I have started a “doomwatch” site list of these West Midlands abominations, in the hope that people will ask questions again of “what’s in my back yard” , rather than just accepting the lie that everything is roses because Boris and his fascistic goons and some bent environmental consultants said it would be.
I am updating this periodically, and the latest version with the SL site licence numbers can be found below.
To complement this, I have since been sent a link by an interesting contact regards what the EA claim to know about historic waste sites nationally.
Processed-historic-landfill-sites-1
It is quite clear from a cursory glance of this, and I will be doing a post on the layout and info contained in this next, that there is a massive vacuum of information missing from this spread sheet, particularly of the actual chemicals dumped under the licences, which is of course, the only information worth knowing!
There is no doubt that this has been entirely orchestrated by the civil service and the political class to deny us this information, to assist crooked housing developers in their monetary gain, and to facilitate the building of houses on contaminated land. It is a disgrace that individuals and organisations have conspired to cover up and obfuscate this evidence of the past, in order for a few to acquire current financial gain. Thus when the chair of the EA in 2020 talks of “The Environment Agency works to speed up sustainable development by helping developers meet regulatory requirements efficiently, providing advice so they get it right first time” she really means that the EA have hidden away anything that prevents development that would slow it down, relaxed regulatory requirements as a result, and provided advice to get around any other problems like “what’s in your backyard”?
One example of the corrupt planning system, and of developers who have cheated and defrauded people out of money can be found in Bradford. This estate backs onto a former landfill site which emits toxic methane gas. The homes are worthless. Where were the safeguards here with this development?
If you go back to 1990 and the dire Environmental Protection Act (sic), it is clear that this legislation was deliberately watered down and doctored to make building on contaminated land easier and not more difficult. This is because of the flawed source-pathway-receptor ideal, in that if there is no “pathway”- that is one that the builders and their agents cannot envisage, then it is perfectly fine to connive a scheme for “shovel ready” building. But this is a false flag construct, and “pathways” are not the issue, the source and the contaminants are! It is a means of leaving past contamination in the ground forever, and as I have pointed out with Rattlechain before, the more houses you build around a site, the “human shields” ensure that it becomes more dangerous to ever deal with the issue, so it is just left there.
An article from Planning magazine in this year of the legislation actually raises the concerns that I am stating as fact below. Yet unfortunately, the MP’s who wanted greater powers and regulation do not appear to have got their way with Thatcher and then Major’s piss poor Act.
With particular relevance to the article are the central quotations;
“The MP’s are concerned that what they see as the main issues have not been addressed. “Little or no thought has been given to the big central questions. Who ought to pay to clean up contaminated sites- and how can they be made to do it? How can contamination be prevented? Should contaminated chemicals be destroyed, or is it enough to just cover them up? How clean is clean and how safe is “safe” enough?”
These questions were never answered by the useless legislation that was enacted , and houses still are allowed to be built on contaminated land by covering up back gardens with 50cm of topsoil- such as those in Callaghan and Wilson Drives built by Barratt Homes. The chemicals are not destroyed, they remain underground.
Years of incompetence by people like Ken Harvey of the West Midlands County Council and his goons have left us with contaminated land where houses have been built, useless safeguards, and platitudes from politicians who have not got a bloody clue about how dire this base card foundation was. You cannot take the current EA information as any use for informed factual evidence about past contamination, and therefore if someone comes along and does some tests and finds nothing, how convenient that the historic information was removed to pave the way for this end use.
This is why I am calling for a full public inquiry into the integrity and competence of the former West Midlands County Council Waste Disposal authority and the former Walsall council hazardous waste unit.
There are questions to answer about their incompetence and failures to keep adequate records, uphold licences, and their lack of scientific knowledge in the field. Their relationships with companies and the ability for them to transfer employment from regulatory quangos to the polluters is another matter, of which I cite examples in Walsall here, and here.
I have communicated all of the above as evidence in my submission on the Government’s abysmal white paper; a planning fraud on “reforming the planning system” , only to the benefit of party political funding house building concerns- The Tory tuppers. The hinderance of deliberately removing historic information from the public domain on these landfill sites is entirely linked to this, and it is a disgrace; and the people who have been responsible for doing so are utterly corrupt in office.
The agency currently are only “creating a better place” for millionaires, the environment remains rancid.