Some of you may have been aware of the recent Appeal and Public Inquiry for the Arecleoch windfarm extension in South Ayrshire by Scottish Power Renewables in January this year. SPR and other developers are basically trying to oversaturate an area (which is already saturated) with a raft of windfarm applications for turbines 200m plus in height. (one excuse given by the developers for this height is that it’s now difficult to source turbines of a lower height!!)
I was asked to help because of the very large number of private water supplies with potential to be affected around Barrhill.
I posted some advice on this site in January, for those who may facing a public inquiry and much of that advice was borne out of my experience and attempts to intimidate and belittle me at the hands of SPR’s solicitors at the Inquiry. In my cross examination by SPR, I was not asked a single question about any of the private water supplies for the Arecleoch appeal(!), but instead was asked extensively about the (failed) appeal by SPR for Whitelee Extension 3 in 2015, where I had also been a public witness. It seemed to me a bit of an own goal to raise Whitelee again, as it highlighted the four PWS which had been lost (3 permanently) during the construction period of Whitelee, as well as SPR’s own actual adverse monitoring results of groundwater and many other PWS adjacent to Whitelee over many years. They also attempted to rattle my cage and discredit my evidence as being a member of SAS and tried to misrepresent SAS’s aims of trying to influence Scottish Government policy on windfarms – a well used tactic by Renewables legal teams. It’s extraordinary that Reporters allow such irrelevant and aggressive behaviour to continue. Perhaps it provides entertainment value!
Now that closing submissions have gone in for this Inquiry and they’re available to view on http://www.dpea.scotland.gov.uk/Document.aspx?id=743468
I thought I would post a few observations about this appeal from a PWS perspective. (The third party closing statement covers 3 topics: Policy, PWS and Noise – so its long and extensive.)
Since 2010, the right to a safe and adequate water supply has been enshrined as a Human Right, but it seems that Human Rights come a poor second to meeting the Scottish Governments climate change targets and that Drinking Water Legislation designed to risk assess and safeguard water supplies doesn’t apply to windfarm developers – at least, that is what was argued at this Inquiry by SPR solicitors, despite key advice referred to by SLR in ‘Good Practice during Windfarm Construction 4th Edn’ – seemingly something of a construction bible produced by Scottish Renewables, SNH, SEPA and Forestry Commission Scotland.
Whilst we have all thought for a long time that human beings and their water supplies come a poor second to peat, fish and birds, now we have proof…
In SPR’s terms of reference to their environmental consultants SLR, who were tasked with producing the Environmental Impact Assessment Report and the site design for the Arecleoch planning application, the consultants were told to consider visual impacts, peat, ecology , hydrology in general (fish etc), amongst other things, but there was apparently not a word about private water supplies, nor the health of the very many souls who depend entirely upon the approximately 35 identified private water supplies (the Council consider this number an underestimate), not just for their drinking water, but in some cases for the viability of their businesses.
So it wouldn’t be a surprise then to know that no visits to private water sources or questionnaires to only a select few of those PWS owners occurred until after there had been a design ‘chill’. The alleged visits to identify PWS sources- even to the six eventually deemed to be at ‘risk’, failed even to identify the correct types and locations of all water sources in the PWS risk assessment – and yet this is a critical document underpinning the reasoning that Scottish Ministers may or may not grant consent.
So it wouldn’t surprise you to know then, that excavations and blasting in three borrow pits, building seven 200m turbines, each with up to 38m foundations, many kilometres of new and altered roads, water crossings, cable trenches and a large substation with permanent welfare facilities on a water catchment area for a surface water abstraction at the windfarm boundary, providing the only water to three properties and businesses didn’t alter the design one jot either!
But it might surprise you to know that of the PWS owners who were said to have had either visits and conversation with the consultants, or questionnaires to fill in, that eleven PWS owners produced signed statements to DPEA refuting the visits/questionnaires or correcting the wrong details that had been published about their water supplies.
And that, my friends is supposedly the accurate level of environmental information that is provided to Reporters so that they can make informed decisions which will affect people’s health, homes and livelihoods.
Rachel Connor
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