Ah, a white beach and beautiful blue water. That’s where Club 18-30 IQ gather these days, and their equally bright tour guides put up helpful signs. The water is so clear you can watch the car wrecks rusting on the bottom.
Personally, I wouldn’t dream of going into any body of water whose edges were ringed with decaying car parts and litter but if there are people dim enough to drive 20 miles just to spend time among the flotsam and swim in water that no fish can live in, good luck to them.
The water is alkaline, just over pH 11, which means there’s not much alive in there. Not much at all. Even at a bacterial level, there’s not much going on.
That does not mean it will dissolve you. Sure, it has a similar pH to bleach and ammonia but if there was even one page of a chemistry course in the heads of anyone concerned, they would know that -
a) pH does not measure acid or alkali strength, and
b) pH does not cause infectious disease.
Cranberry juice generally has a pH of less than 3. It’s not far off having the same pH as hydrochloric acid but you can drink cranberry juice and still have a tongue and a throat. All pH measures is a ratio: the proportion of H+ to OH- ions in the solution. It does not tell you how many there are, just the ratio of them. How many are there is what makes the difference between the acidic taste of cranberry juice and the very brief, very painful taste you get with hydrochloric acid before the lower part of your face makes a mess of your shirt.
Also, considering who is visiting this little lagoon, why does the council imagine that talking about pH will mean anything at all?
Telling people there are dead animals and floating turds in the water, when people can see for themselves that there are not, is more than futile. It means that anyone looking at the sign will say ‘well, they are lying about that, so it’s probably all lies’.
As for it causing thrush, pH 11 is not what causes thrush. That’s an infection by a yeast called Candida (it was called that long before the chavs picked up the name) and not by alkalinity. Even Candida would struggle to stay alive at pH 11. It’s true that taking the body’s acidic defences into neutral territory by immersing it in alkaline solution would allow an infection to overcome those defences, but that alone cannot cause the infection. The infective agent has to be there at the time.
Nobody comes out of this looking intelligent. The council are looking for ways to fence off something that is on private land, knowing full well that any remote fenced-off area will have holes in that fence within a week. The idiots in the water think they have a cheap version of Ibiza, while they sit on banks of limestone and paddle around among the wreckage in water that isn’t blue because it’s clean – it’s blue because it’s not.
I’d say, put up the warning signs and leave it at that. If people choose to ignore the warnings and take the risk, leave them to it. They are, in effect, trespassing in order to immerse themselves in something nasty but if that’s what they want to do, I wouldn’t stand in their way. The owner of this defunct quarry isn’t bothered by their presence, apparently, and most (probably all) of the junk dumped in there has nothing to do with that owner either.
The owner is not inviting them, so the owner is not responsible for them. The council don’t own the land so they are not responsible either. The most likely accident there is that someone will step on something sharp, or get caught up in underwater wreckage. Who is responsible?
The ones trespassing, ignoring the signs and playing around in the muck are responsible for their own actions.
It’s about time people learned what that actually means. So let them play.
XX Who is responsible?
The ones trespassing, ignoring the signs and playing around in the muck are responsible for their own actions. XX
Hmm. Wonder if there is case law on this…? Should think so, the railways seem to pay up pretty sharp when some arsehole decides to fry his bollox off, pissing on the third rail after a night out.
Aha, I didn’t know that about pH being the proportion, you learn something new every day on the internet.
Thanks LI, I got a grade A in Chemistry A Level without knowing precisely what pH means.
Thank you LI
I was probably staring mindlessly out of the window in chemistry.
I now know that they meant something entirely different when I read “at the height of the Great London Smog, the air had the same pH as lemon juice” except now I can’t visualise it at all.
Surely the reason we shouldn’t drink ammonia or bleach has nothing to do with either’s PH?
Your’s sounds like Robert Heinlein’s idea of disposing of nuclear waste. Stick it in a big pile in the middle of the desert with a fence around it at a safe distance explaining what will happen to you if you go further. Every time someone goes in average human intelligence notches up an imperceptible amount. Of course a minefield should also be put inside the fence…
From a short story by Larry Niven, not Robert Heinlein. Niven and Pournelle also coined the phrase; “Think of it as evolution in action” in ‘Oath of fealty’.
So, let’s get this straight. People have been coming to this spot for at least a decade and paddling and swimming in this so-called “highly toxic” water without so much as a hint of serious health problems; the owners of the site haven’t closed it off securely, so clearly they feel that their chances of being sued are minimal to say the least; and the Council can’t (won’t?) do anything about it, possibly because they don’t feel that the water is toxic enough for them to be able to do so (because I’m fairly sure that if there is a source of genuinely toxic water on any land – public or private – then they must have the power to demand that it be cleaned up, or at least very securely closed to the public).
But the real reason is buried deep in the middle of the article: “it causes untold problems for villagers with cars blocking roads.” So there you have it. All the time that just a few people were risking life and limb swimming in toxic sludge it was fine, as long as Mrs Ponsonby-Smythe could get past in her 4×4 to take Jemima to ballet class and Mr Ponsonby-Smythe could get his Jaguar through on his way to the office. How coincidental, then, that at precisely the point at which all those “common” people’s scruffy little cars should begin to cause “untold problems” on those oh-so-vital journeys that the “villagers” should suddenly be demanding that “something should be done.” All, of course, for the “common” people’s “own good.” As always.
You might well have hit the nail right on the head there.
My thoughts on the matter pretty much. Now here’s a radicle idea, Why don’t the people who use it, bring a few black plastic bags and have a day picking up all the crap? It also might be a good idea to to take their crap home with them instead of just leaving it there.
I wondered where all the new-looking rubbish had come from. It’s a place things would blow into and stay, but where could it have come from? Then I heard that the place had been Chavbiza for a decade, and it all became clear.
As for the car wrecks, no disused quarry is complete without at least one. Even if it’s impossible to drive there.
XX As for the car wrecks, no disused quarry is complete without at least one. Even if it’s impossible to drive there.XX
Same applies to bricks and beaches.
No matter WHERE the beach, or how far away it is from any SIGN of buildings EVER having been there, there is ALWAYS, and I mean 100% without fail, somewhere on the beach, a house brick.
I recall, back in NJ, there being a flooded quarry, up on a mountain, in the forest, with a school bus resting on its bottom. And not even one of those short ones. It used to be used by scuba instructors.
I’d be tempted to load that bus with little mannequins…
There’s probably a loony who has made it his life’s work to put one brick on every beach. He probably has an Arts Council grant.
Saw this and thought of you LI, it’s rather well-written (at least I think so, your standards are likely to be considerably higher).
http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/2328/anti-smoking-campaigners-hooked-on-legislation
(In full-on sad, tedious mode, strictly speaking pH is just a function of the H+ concentration, rather than the OH/H ratio. Though you can work out the OH- concentration from it if you feel the need).
BTW I never understood why pure acetic acid is considered so much more dangerous to handle than say, citric acid. From a theoretical viewpoint citric is stronger)
Nice deconstruction LI.
Also worth mentioning that, even were pH a direct measure of the acid/alkali strength, nowhere in the article did it mention that it is also a logarithmic scale, meaning that a pH of 11.3 is only nearly the same as that of bleach at 12.6 in the same way that the number one is nearly the same as the number 20 (or thereabouts).
Still, that would have been even more of a non-story and probably not even made it into the Mail.
It also occurred to me that nobody with a non-science background would even consider a value of 11 to be worth thinking about – because they won’t know that the scale only goes up to 14.
And I am not going to start explaining log scales here – not unless I get the urge to glaze every eye that falls upon the screen.
XX that would have been even more of a non-story and probably not even made it into the Mail.XX
Since when has it being a “non story” ever detered the Mail?
You know, this story makes me want to head on up there with a few carbuoys of fuming nitric acid and some nice strong phosphoric acid. I wouldn’t be able to haul enough up there to neutralise the alkalinity, but I bet I could push the phosphate and nitrate levels high enough to cause an algal bloom. Turquoise to emerald green in a week!
(So I’m a slightly crazed biologist with a PhD involving sex pheromones and potatoes; my mind works in strange, devoius ways…)
Ah yes, a lovely thick layer of green scum on the surface would solve the problem once and for all.
Isn’t the thick scum there every weekend and that’s what the locals are complaining about?
Always had a soft spot for Hydrofluoric acid, actualy.
With that stuff, all your spots go soft.