Aggregate Industries, its water consultants Wood, the Environment Agency and Devon County Council can’t or won’t get their heads around the nature of groundwater flow through the unsaturated zone – the vadose zone, the zone that Aggregate Industries wants to remove at Straitgate Farm, the zone so important for surrounding private water supplies. This is despite countless warnings from Professor Brassington, a renowned authority on the subject.
Aggregate Industries' consultants have claimed "recharge reaches the water table in the BSPB through unsaturated thicknesses of between approximately 3 and 10 m within between 1 and 3 days". Professor Brassington says groundwater flow through the unsaturated zone takes years, and the removal of it will in time make drinking water sources too acidic.
In an effort to overcome this apparent lack of understanding, Professor Brassington has sent the above bodies links to a series of online mini-lectures by Professor John Selker of Oregon State University, who, Professor Brassington writes:
...covers the flow through the vadose zone very clearly and clarifies this bit of the hydrological cycle that is often missed by hydrogeologists in our training.
