Volume Five - The Age of Decline & Crass Stupidity - Some comments and a final rant! . . .

The Environment Agency [112] website (What's in my backyard) makes no reference to the unmentionables I witnessed but does refer to radioactive discharges into the sewage system from Llandough hospital dating back for a decade or so and on an annual basis; so goodness knows what went on before that date but it does perhaps explain why the local rats were so large!

Back at the dock in the period 1971 to 1990 (the period that the dock was used as a municipal dump) and prior to the Cardiff Bay development initiative, there is a potential that water leaked back into the dock through the permeable dam, local gravel beds and marls, and the stonework quaysides to ensure that the mix of household and industrial waste eventually turned into a festering broth of the least nutritious kind! Where would precipitation go if the dock was actually a watertight enclosure? In the period 1981-2000 the Met Office website [117] states that the average rainfall for Penarth was 1.15m (45.4 inches) per annum and it rains on average 150 days each year.

In Issues in Environmental Geology [111], a learned book by Bennet and Doyle published in 1998 the extent of local tips is discussed:

“Post-1945, the principal landfill site of the region is at Penarth Moors, although tipping stopped here in 1995/96. This site was first tipped in 1969, and is bounded to the east by Ferry Road and the Penarth Flats and the River Ely to the west. Two major meanders of the River Ely which originally ran through the site were plugged, drained and filled before tipping over the whole area began.

These old channel routes may have cut down into the glacio-fluvial gravels which occur extensively in this area, and as such there could present a pollutant pathway into the main aquifer of the Cardiff Bay Region. Extensive post-1945 landfill is found at Leckwith Moors, Tipping was completed in 1974 and like Penarth Moors, this site contains relict channels of the River Ely that were channelised prior to its development. To the south of the River Ely the Penarth Dock Tip occupies the western end of the old docks. Tipping began in the 1960’s and was completed in 1995/6 with 750,000 m3.

The site is also underlain by the gravel beds, and consequently as part of the development program this 23ha site has been contained by 1100m of slurry wall and diaphragm wall upto 23m (75ft) deep (Privett 1996).”