Canal contempt

Recently there was some suspicious activity noted on the Birmingham canal near Rattlechain. The pump from the lagoon had been switched on again and was flowing out of the larger lagoon. A couple of cars were up on the cut and it was quickly apparent that some “monitoring” was going on concerning water samples.

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Bottles were filled and placed into a box.

 

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A slightly demented German Shephard watched intently from the other side inbetween chasing the passing trains.

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Later inspection also revealed that the Canalside boreholes had been uncovered and remarked. But the curious and still unanswered question concerns the discharge being made to the canal from the now “covered” larger lagoon which is still producing bubbles of obvious phosphine gas from below the surface.

The original licence allowed the site operators to discharge water from the so called “clean side”, the smaller Western subsidiary lagoon constructed around 1961. Since 2014 however and following the so called “improvement works” of 2013, the site operators appear to have utilised the newly added pier pump to discharge only from the larger now supposedly covered lagoon. The smaller lagoon was never covered with geotextile membrane and no sand was added either.

I decided to ask the Environment Agency what was going on here and they replied treating a simple question as a freedom of information request, which it wasn’t. As the contact email for the person in Environment management no longer appears responsive , (the person the EA appeared to have delegated to answer my questions), I am unsure as to who in the EA is now looking at matters Rattlechain.

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Please find a response to your email dated the 5th May 2016: 

Why are Rhodia/Solvay pumping water from the large lagoon instead of the smaller one? 
They are pumping from the larger lagoon as the ammonia levels are lower in the larger lagoon than the smaller lagoon according to testing conducted by the operator. 
Do Rhodia/Solvay have permission to do this and why no longer from the smaller lagoon, have they been restricted from doing this and for what reason? 
The operator had a meeting with the Environment Agency in April 2015 to discuss the change in pumping, and as the discharge permit did not specify which lagoon the water was pumped from they have decided to pump from the larger lagoon for reasons given above. 
Do the EA still sample from the canal discharge point? Have there been any changes to the licence? 
There have been no changes to the discharge permit and yes we endeavour to gain a sample from the discharge point at the canal.  The Environment Agency do have a sampling programme to monitor the discharge which is currently under review as a discharge is not always being made at the time of sampling.  Samples may be taken directly from the lagoon in future.  This would not require a change to the permit.

The wording of the discharge consent is indeed open to abuse given that it only specifies the discharge point to the canal, and not the source from where the “pumped quarry water” comes from.

There remains no creditable explanation as to what chemistry is going on with the smaller lagoon, why it was never covered like the main lake, and why the ammonia levels are higher, especially when it was claimed that a one off exercise in February 2014 was carried out to lower the levels using aluminium sulphate. Well obviously that didn’t work did it and we are now two years on from this?

So Rhodia rig up a hosepipe from the contaminated larger lagoon connected to an old piece of pontoon that they once used to discharge “hazardous waste”  into the lagoon direct from tankers from their site.  Periodically they then discharge what we are supposed to believe to be just water into the cut.

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So there you have it. The EA continue to coast along on the crest of whatever the site operator appear to want to do at any point in time to suit their own agenda.

Whilst passing John’s Lane I happened to notice two pairs of recently disposed  latex gloves.

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