Fish Chips and Antifreeze, Manston Airport Drains Again, Drop in session in Ramsgate Tomorrow.

This is another one of those crazy “only in Thanet” situations that makes you wonder what the council is doing. Why there has been no publicity about this from Thanet District Council, no press release nothing on their website it beggars belief.

The first I heard about this was on Dave Green’s blog, see http://eastclifframsgate.blogspot.com/2011/01/manston-discharge-consent.html

Anyway if you want to discuss draining the Manston runways into Pegwell Bay with the environment agency then it’s tomorrow Jan 20th from 10am until 4pm at 161-165 High Street Ramsgate.

This is an old problem about what goes down the drain, here in Thanet back when Manston first started being an airfield during WW1 all the drains either lead to soakaways into the ground .
Manston Airport is on top of Thanet’s underground drinking water reservoir so at different times in the airport’s history efforts have been made to divert the drainage away from our water supply.

Because of the very large areas of concrete at the airport, when we a large amount of rain there is too much water going down the drains at the airport for the local sewage system to cope with,

Over the last 90 years or so as Manston developed there has been a steady movement away from draining into the ground there towards piping the water runoff into the sea at Pegwell Bay.

This was fine until Pegwell Bay was designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, here is the information about this http://www.english-nature.org.uk/citation/citation_photo/1001128.pdf affter this happened there has been an ongoing attempt to get various airport operators to get a discharge consent.