I WAS very struck, and not positively, by Cllrs Beesley's rallying cry that we need to see off the drilling companies as we saw off the Navitus wind farm
In support of this position he runs through a list of impacts and conceivable risks. To take three main threats he lists:
Highly visible rig: but then so too is the 30 tons of concrete and steel on Bournemouth beach used to anchor a very ugly, and noisy, zip wire. And what does the councillor say to thunderous Euro and Typhoon jets flying low level over the town? They are not highly visible and with huge risks?
Drilling mud and cement pollution: but then these are in a closed system within the drill piping. It is used to weigh down back pressure from oil and carefully monitored. If left in the well it would be to seal the well. There is no external pollution on the sea bed.
Blow-out risks: This is 99 per cent movie fiction left over from 1920s Texas drilling. The only major offshore blowout in modern history is Deepwater Horizon. But then UK offshore is far more regulated for safety than other areas of the world.
If there was a blowout, then of course oil would, as Cllr Beesley, states, stating the obvious, "100 per cent reach beaches", but then the risk of any blow out is rated at around one in a million wells drilled. That is the far more significant factor. Far more likely for a display Euro jet to crash on the town
I would have liked the councillor to have called us to oppose drilling on the point of oil industry hydrocarbon atmosphere pollution running at billions of tons a year. That is the real and critical risk. But to do that he would have had to admit Navitus wind farm, which council condemned in every respect in 2015, is the very solution we need to see the end of all oil drilling including in Bournemouth Bay.
JUSTIN WALSH, Bournemouth Road, Poole
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