Representation by Kay Smith
- Date submitted
- 8 September 2018
- Submitted by
- Members of the public/businesses
I moved to Herne Bay twelve years ago and was not worried by living under the Manston flight path with limited flights, except when a cargo plane occasionally flew over. It was truly deafening and rattled the windows. I suffer from [Redacted] and could never rest after an experience like that. RSP say there will be no night flights, but their own documents are deeply flawed and prove there will be. Noisier cargo flights, that are not currently allowed at Heathrow, with noise levels that fall short of the World Health Organization guidelines for twenty-four hours a day, would be unbearable.
I am a retired teacher and now volunteer in the town’s Infant school. I am extremely worried about the education of a generation of children blighted by no sleep. I have read about the adverse effects on schools situated under flight paths and seen firsthand what sleep deprivation can do to both children and adults. RSP acknowledge this fact too.
Experts agree that the air cargo market is not growing and Stansted and the East Midlands are already set up for these operations and they have spare capacity, with direct links to the motorway network feeding in all directions. Manston by comparison doesn’t have a motorway link for at least twenty miles, and then in only one direction-West. Our already overcrowded roads would be gridlocked with container lorries and fuel tankers, as there is not even a fuel line in this area. Manston is not the ideal location for a cargo hub. Thanet would become known only as a polluted, industrial area with severe traffic congestion. What a terrifying prospect for ours and other prospering seaside towns.
Manston failed as a cargo airport when the UK market was more than twice the size that it is today and no commercial airport has ever proved successful here. The fact remains, it was and still remains in the wrong place, even though it has a ‘long’ runway. Many reports have completely rubbished their proposals stating ‘all evidence points to Manston continuing to fail as a commercial proposition’.
No one wants more houses, but they are needed; local jobs too are needed but a cargo hub isn’t going to achieve this aspiration. This would essentially be a freight airport, so very few local jobs would be created and nothing like the 30,000 new jobs the developers are eluding to.
When lives, health, the environment, heritage and Thanet’s economy have all been ruined, properties devalued and the project eventually fails, what will the land be used for- probably the needed housing? How could tourism and our heritage sites survive in our small seaside towns, with unlimited day and night cargo plane numbers?
I pray that PINS come to the right decision for North Kent. Should Manston become a huge, dirty, noisy freight cargo hub twenty-four hours a day, I would need to move from the town I love, and many others would have to leave too.