Urgent need for environmental assessment

Dear Sir,

I subscribe to your Newsletter which I find very informative. I would like to raise some questions about what involvement the Environment Agency (EA) have in these developments.

In my view, based upon past experience with Industrial Planning issues, the EA should be involved. Indeed I think they should be involved as part of all the planning issues and meetings. There are far too many environmental issues at stake for them not to be actively involved, these issues to name but a few are :-

• Noise
• Air Quality, seriously affected by emissions from aircraft engines, dumping of fuel under emergency situations, cargo handling equipment, lorries etc collecting cargo from the airport, passenger cars and the list could go on.
• Pollution arising from such things as run off from the runways, maintenance and servicing of aircraft and other vehicles, any form of accident and God forbid an aircraft crashing.
• For the current activities at Manston has there been an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) carried out?
• Is such an assessment planned for the proposed increase in activities?

In my experience there certainly should be such an assessment, otherwise there can be no record of what changes are occurring and what damage is being done to the environment.

When considering the environment it is not just the environment local to Manston for consideration the environment of a far wider area must be considered this could stretch from Whitstable all along the coast to Ramsgate and out into the sea, and down towards Maidstone, Ashford and Folkestone.

Continuing with the theme of assessments, again in my experience, Risk Assessments for all the activities at Manston should be carried out. These should take into account all the "What Ifs" such as:

• Serious accident ie, aircraft crashing
• Fire
• Are the Emergency Services currently sufficiently manned, trained and equipped to deal with such emergencies?
• Again the list could go on.

I will be very interested to hear your comments to my points.

Also, could you provide me with the contact addresses, emails etc of all our local councillors, MP and any other parties/persons to lobby. I firmly believe that as many of the public as possible should 'take up the cudgels' to curtail any further activities at Manston.

Yours Sincerely,

M.L. Herne Bay

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ML - you have touched on a number of good points.

• There is no doubt that the EA should have been actively encouraged to be more closely involved, starting a long time ago.
• The only people who don't think an EIA is long overdue are the airport and the Council.
• The noise, air and water pollution are long-standing issues. On each count, both the airport and the Council have conspicuously failed to monitor the ongoing damage and the potential risks.
• No EIA has been carried out on Manston's activities. Whenever the prospect of an EIA is mentioned, both the airport and the Council go pale, and start wriggling.
• You are absolutely right to highlight the geographical scope of the airport's impact - the air and water pollution spread even further than the noise pollution.
• All emergency services live in dread of catastrophic major incidents. By definition, these are of such a scale that it is not economically feasible to be fully prepared for them. Put bluntly, the question becomes: by how much will the emergency services and medical services fail on the day?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if other readers have more comments of their own...

• You can contact all your elected representatives through www.WriteToThem.com
• You can find details of the Canterbury councillors here (Peter Vickery-Jones holds the Transport Portfolio and sits on KIACC)
• You can find details of the Thanet councillors here (Joanna Gideon chairs the Airport Working Party)
• You should consider supporting CPRE Protect Kent - they're supporting us.

Manston's dreams and nightmares

"Nostrildamus nose the future"Nostrildamus says:

• Infratil's Charles Buchanan will shortly unveil his plans to stuff our ears with plane noise 24 hours a day.
• He will brandish carrots and sticks as if they were real.
• He will repeat the mantra that the airport will have to close if the proposals aren't accepted.
• He will never say that he will close the airport - far too personal.
• He will want to distract attention from the fact that the closure of the airport is a purely commercial decision, already more than half-made.
• He will want to abdicate responsibility to 'prevailing circumstances', and shift the blame onto an 'uncooperative' local Council.
• He will alarm the Council with the threat of dozens of jobs lost if the airport closes.
• He will cajole the Council with promises of thousands of jobs created if he gets his way.
• He will present the reports he's commissioned as proof of his case, because there is nothing else that supports his claims.
• He will never say that that the night flights he's asking for won't be enough to make the airport break even, let alone become profitable.
• He will say that night flights will be the catalyst that will make the Master Plan achievable and the airport profitable.
• He will never say that every penny of profit will be repatriated to New Zealand in the most tax-efficient way possible.
• He will never admit that the Master Plan, which has missed every significant target and forecast, is a work of unachievably optimistic guesstimation.
• He will muddy the water with promises of flights to New York.
• He will not explain that the carrier (currently called Acer Airways) says it won't exist until 2013 at the earliest.

• TDC's Cllr Bayford is unaware that KCC's Leader Paul Carter is using him as a disposable human shield.
• He will continue to champion the airport as a 'good thing'.
• He will do everything he can to ensure that TDC Labour don't have a free vote on the issue.
• He will continue the fiction that TDC Conservatives will have a free vote on the issue.
• He will continue to use last minute procedural and legal ploys.
• He will seek to skew the public consultation towards a 'Yes' result.
• He will ignore a 'No' result.

• Thanet District Council denies that it holds any records of legal advice on airport planning issues, night flights or the S106 agreement in the last 10 years.
• Nostrildamus has framed copies of the legal advice TDC has received.
• The legal advice confirms that the airport is long overdue for a formal planning application, due to the incremental development over the years.
• The legal advice confirms that the intensification of use resulting from night flights would require a planning application.
• TDC dreads this: it will highlight a decade of slapdash management and craven fawning.
• The airport dreads this too: it would automatically trigger an EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) lasting a couple of years, while the airport continues to lose £5m a year.

KCC, TDC and Infratil want the night flights proposals to be rubber-stamped with the minimum of fuss.

And they don't give a toss about you.