I had to laugh…
…when Kanaya Singh, a Labour councillor for Riverside in Cardiff, said that the disgraceful quantities of litter blighting the banks of the River Taff “give visitors to Cardiff an entirely wrong impression”. He couldn’t be more wrong, because actually the plastics, toilet paper, sanitary towels, supermarket trolleys, packaging, general garbage and miscellaneous fly-tipped rubbish give a very accurate impression of Cardiff: a filthy dump.
…when a mass litter-pick for 30 minutes by 1,327 volunteers along the Taff’s Fitzhamon Embankment, organised by Keep Wales Tidy, Natural Resources Wales and Cardiff Harbour Authority, was trumpeted as a world record and hailed as ‘wonderful’. Apparently the previous record was 329 people participating in a clean-up on the banks of the River Ganges in India, notorious as one of the dirtiest rivers on the planet. Leaving aside the fact that this short stretch of the Taff embankment was immediately tangled in fresh detritus within days, has it really come to this in Cardiff where the river being in such an atrocious condition that it is even more desperately in need of a clean up than the Ganges is a reason for celebration?
…when Cardiff Bay’s ‘Aqua Park’ was recently closed down after operating for just two summers and relocated to Cosmeston Lake in the Vale of Glamorgan because the water quality in the Bay is so bad nobody should touch it, let alone children splashing around on sub-Disney ‘attractions’. I told you so.
…when the Harbour Authority, an offshoot of Cardiff Council, feigned surprise as if they had been anticipating the weather of Benidorm, and blamed “heavy rain”, “increased river flows” and “wet summers” for the fact the Bay’s water quality repeatedly failed tests. Were they not aware that Cardiff’s climate is renowned for its tendency to be rainy? Have they not heard of the global increase in extreme weather events caused by climate change? Do they not know that the raw sewage regularly discharged into the Taff and the Ely and their catchments ends up in the Bay? Are they ignorant of the fact that the Barrage raised what was already a naturally high water-table underneath Cardiff and made sewage overflows and backwashes more frequent? Can they not comprehend that all the unwanted, unaffordable housing developments the Council has allowed to be plastered across Cardiff’s last fragments of countryside have put impossible demands on the city’s Victorian sewage system? Will they ever concede that the disgusting man-made lake of Cardiff Bay is a lifeless disaster full of toxic poisons, dangerous leaches and sheer shit, a terrible mistake that must be reversed? These, of course, are all rhetorical questions; Cardiff Council doesn’t answer to Cardiffians – just big business, hedge funds, speculative profiteers and billionaires.
What a laugh!
They were told that this would happen when the barrage was first mooted….
I hear that the locals are unimpressed by the proposed relocation of the Aqua Park’ to Cosmeston Lake.
As I recall some of the risks identified when the barrage was first planned were:
– flooding of cellars in Riverside and Grangetown, caused by raised water table. Some measures may have been taken to prevent this but I’m not sure what these were.
– stinking green slime caused by blooms of algae. These blooms would probably have persisted for a few years until the various nutrients in the water were used up, settled into the sediments or whatever. Providing no more phosphates etc were flushed into the bay, which with hindsight was a big ask, the problem could resolve itself. In the mean time the bubbling of compressed air that you can see in the water flowing into the bay is probably an attempt to counteract this risk of eutrophication or hypoxia.
– swarms of small flying insects.
and no doubt others. But I don’t recall the inadequacy of the essentially late Victorian sewerage system to deal with huge new housing developments to the north of Cardiff being a factor at the time. Bit of an own goal by the planning authorities, you might think.