Oil Leak 84 No worse than filling up your car?

In one of our many FOI’s on STS, we noticed there was an email from Mr Buskie to a council official, describing the STS process as not much different from filling up a car at petrol station (we paraphrase, but that was the gist of it). At the time we though that was ridiculous, but actually in some ways its a good analogy. Think about how many times you’ve gone into a petrol station and there’s been fuel lying on the ground, maybe sand has been put down to absorb it. Maybe you’ve done it yourself – you go to fill up and a load of fuel from the previous customer comes out the end of the hose and ends up the ground? There may be a leak in the hose? You might overfill the car?You don’t empty all the fuel out the hose before withdrawing from your tank. All easily done – the point is when fuel is transferred from one place to another, accidents inevitably happen. Maybe not catastrophic accidents, but small & frequent spills. After the issues being experienced with the residents of Southwold with STS from low level spills and the substances used to clean them up, it is clear that the reality of STS is that it is no different – is this something we want or need along our coastline?