Industrial-scale pollution - a damning indictment of Jersey's environmental policy

It's not often that you learn that your borehole water might be poisoned from the front page of the local rag.

Even the most slack-jawed, braindead apologist for the government's appalling record on environmental issues will admit that this hasn't exactly been a fantastic week for the government's environmental PR. On Monday, the rag's front page carried a story entitled "PFOS chemical pollution investigation intensifies", which provided all of us lucky enough to live in areas which aren't on mains drains (yes, there are places in one of the richest places in Europe, in the year of our Lord 2019, that are not connected to the mains drains network) with the news that we might be drinking carcinogenic fire retardant. The stuff in question - perfluorooctane sulphonate, or PFOS - is something about which concerns have been raised before (according to the rag, as far back as the '90s), including a nice little incident back in February where it was found that boreholes in St. Peter still contained traces of this stuff from back when it was used to put out a burning plane after a crash in 1980.

That's almost 40 years ago, and this chemical - that causes cancer - is still in the water.

This week, tests in a stream near the airport revealed a PFOS level of 1.2400μg/l - once again, above safe levels.

But, don't worry, borehole users - the Environment Department has knocked up some new guidelines to ensure we can stay safe! According to the rag's report, they assert that, er, "pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five should not drink borehole water unless it is known exactly what it contains".

I shouldn't need to explain that it really isn't acceptable for certain water sources to be undrinkable for pregnant women and children under five, in the richest place in Britain, in the 21st century. We're literally sending aid workers to end this sort of thing in the External Relation's minister's pet projects in Rwanda, yet we cannot even solve the problem of polluted water in our own backyard. It really is astonishing, and a damning indictment of the utter carelessness that the States continues to show with borehole users. It isn't just the States, either. Certain farmers in the bay have developed a bit of a reputation for pumping their fields full of certain chemicals, some of which can also be seriously harmful if they get into people's drinking water. The fact that there aren't regulations to prevent this, in this day and age, utterly baffles me.

I suppose it could be worse - we could be talking about the levels of pollution at the Waterfront, as revealed on today's front page! If you thought carcinogenic water was bad, wait until you hear this.

According to tests conducted by Earth Project Jersey, the water at the Waterfront is (significantly) more contaminated with heavy metals than water from the port of Jinzhou in northeast China, a city whose major industries include, er, petrochemistry and industrial-scale metallurgy. That's right, folks, our ordinary seawater at the Waterfront is more polluted than the water from Chinese heavy industry.

Considering how common it is for people to mock the Chinese for wearing anti-pollution gear such as smog masks, this sort of thing really should give some people pause for thought. We have no heavy industry - in fact, we scarcely have any industry at all - and yet our water is significantly more polluted than a Chinese petrochemical and metallurgical manufacturing hub. Why? Because luxury flats are being treated as more important than seawater which doesn't slowly and painfully kill invertebrates and fish - because the government would rather appease rich, foreign investors than protect our environment.

It's positively Dickensian.

Oh, well. At least town pledged to become carbon-neutral, right?

EDIT 16:14PM 07/04/19:

It was reported in yesterday's rag that the findings about the water at the Waterfront were incorrectly provided to the paper by a scientist who had done his maths wrong, and thus don't actually reflect the concentration of heavy metals at the Waterfront. We are not, in fact, more polluting than Chinese heavy industry, thank god.

However, the same report carried a statement from a construction industry spin doctor, saying that the concentrations of metals in the water HAVE increased. He then goes on to play this off as temporary and therefore not of concern, but I'd question the wisdom of that sort of thinking. You can never be too careful - and, in any case, your construction site should not be releasing pollution into the water, full stop.