Following the post AI has been pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes – planning inspectors included, the water level in PZ2017/03 was last week found sitting at ground level.
The water level has no doubt reached ground level in this location before – but is not something that has been disclosed by Aggregate Industries.
Remember, the sand and gravel that Aggregate Industries wants starts about 2.3m on average below this level.
What are groundwater levels doing in other boreholes across the site? Have maximum levels been exceeded again, given all the recent rainfall?
No one has any idea because Aggregate Industries is not monitoring them.
This matters, because the maximum water table across the site – the MWWT, guesstimated using previously recorded levels from this borehole and others – will not only form the base of the permitted excavation, to protect the groundwater supplying nearby private water supplies, but will also determine how surface water is managed, to avoid flooding and maintain stream flows.
Last month, Aggregate Industries made clear that it only intended to monitor the boreholes across the excavation site once a month using manual dipping.
Groundwater levels can rise quickly at Straitgate Farm. Borehole readings show that even from a low base they can reach maximum levels in just 4 weeks. Continuous data loggers, as Aggregate Industries and its consultants have used in the past, are therefore essential for capturing these movements. Clearly, the company doesn’t want to do any more than the barest minimum. It certainly doesn’t want to discover that the MWWT has been exceeded again.
