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Well in light of current "shit release" issues i have today had the above folks set up a small stream monitoring excercise on the stream that runs though my land (its not actually a waterway its a drainage ditch for farmland) it has no water in it for 7 to 9 months of the year...
Anyhoo three bods turned up for a full day, taking water and aquatic life samples and they are coming each month for a year so 36 days to monitor 200m of drainage ditch... this year.
I do wonder....
Do you mean the Environment Agency?
I think he's implying it's mental...
It is at times.
Does it matter how long the ditch is? If there’s a chance of unlawful discharge then fair play to them.
Not all farmers are fat cuddly chirpy country folk - some are right barstewards who care little for the environment.
I take it the ditch only passes through your land and the source is elsewhere!? 😬
I'm with op - 200m of stream could easily be covered by one person, not three.
Did you speak to them? Is the site remote? was one training the others? was all three part of the same team or different departments working together? could also be logged down as a hostile site or near one?
It's a 1/10 rant from me.
No use of caps and they actually turned up and scheduled follow up work.
You do get that 'shit', whilst emotive, isn't actually the big problem we have. It's farm effluent and nitrates that is killing our rivers. So testing farms is key.
What is your 'shit release' issue?! (If that isn't too personal a question?)
I took the OP as referring to the general state of our waterways, rather than that they had a specific issue, but I've been wrong before...
Ahh a complaint about someone actually doing something 😁 !
Outrageous, I will write to my MP.
I used to be one of those bods. Sometimes we got wind of something about to happen , huge forestry plantation, a new refuse tip, an industrial site... and made sure we got a load of background data so that when it was all ****ed up we could prove it was fine before. New methane production unit in the pre-planning stage ?
There were often two of us, an environmental scientist and a biologist.
I’m with op – 200m of stream could easily be covered by one person, not three.
Working in the middle of nowhere over uneven terrain. What happens if you are working alone and fall or have a heart attack or you come across a nutter.
Makes sense not to be working alone. 3rd person might be in training or supervision to make sure they are doing their job right.
They have probably Identified a problem in the area and are doing research in all streams and trying to rule out places.
Working in the middle of nowhere over uneven terrain. What happens if you are working alone and fall or have a heart attack or you come across a nutter.
I'd be intrigued to know the real figures around this. Is it a very real risk statistically, and is working in groups etc a proportionate management of the real risks?
My gut feel is that the thousands of carers buzzing around people's homes each day are at far greater risk. Same with the truck drivers. Delivery drivers. Farmers. Rangers. Etc etc.
@matt_outandabout - I was sampling water from a drain in Liverpool once (I was an environmental consultant, private sector). As I was down in the ditch I heard a roaring noise and thought it best to get out - just as I got to the top of the bank water rushed into the drain and I could see a tidal bore moving up the Mersey a couple of hundred metres away. I'd probably have been washed away and potentially drowned. I've also been stuck up to my waist in mud in a drain with sampling equipment on my back and I couldn't get out without help.
It's stuff like this that means they really should have a couple of folk there. They don't know til they turn up that it's a shallow, not boggy ditch. And even then, if there's a water release upstream while they're sampling it wouldn't take much to knock a lone worker off their feet and into the slop at the bottom which could suck them in.
Three sounds one too many but for initial set up it may be appropriate if there's additional kit to install. Similarly, if they're different specialists (ecologist, hydrologist, technician) they may need all three. What if you only sent the ecologist and they couldn't get flow data, or took it incorrectly? Or if you only sent the hydrologist and they didn't collect an important species?
As for the frequency of sampling that the OP complains about, you need a surprising amount of data for water samples to be useful. If you're releasing more shit in winter than summer, three monthly monitoring would only give them a single data point. That's not enough to infer anything from. So you need monthly monitoring. Similarly, if you generally release no shit at all but did in May, and they weren't monitoring til July then they'd miss that.
You do get that ‘shit’, whilst emotive, isn’t actually the big problem we have. It’s farm effluent and nitrates that is killing our rivers. So testing farms is key.
A lot of the research in Scotland says that urban sewage is the biggest problem, very very closely followed by agricultural run off. So, basically, none of what people do is good. At Loch Leven there's been fish deaths because of phosphorus levels caused by sewage and agriculture. Same at the Ythan Estuary, plus biodiversity loss, but that's mostly a sewage problem.