Like sand through a sieve, our money is being wasted

OVER the last 50 years I have owned and constructed many industrial buildings. Mostly they were simple constructions with a steel frame and pitched roof and generally with a standard portal frame and flat insulated, usually a sandwich structure. So I am extremely upset that over all these years I had been making a big mistake and should have been constructing them with a barrel roof and bespoke framework, as it is now apparent that this is a much more cost-effective way of constructing a shed as against a standard virtually off-the-shelf designed pitch roof with a portal frame. Or so I assume, as this is how the new waste transfer shed at Longue Hougue is being constructed – and that must be more cost effective, otherwise why are the States building it this way?

This size of shed in the UK would cost somewhere around £75 per ft, so come on States, how much are you paying? My money is on a lot more.

I am still very uncomfortable about sending waste 1,200 miles to Sweden. Environmentally sound?

I don’t think so.

I am also having to upset one of my sailing partners, who runs all the pilot launches on the Humber estuary, with the news that his GRP fibreglass-constructed pilot launches, which they own the tooling for, are no good as he should be building them in aluminium, as it is much stronger. So instead, the ones he has – which are operated day and night and over 50ft in length and with Scania V8 engines and which are very tough – should be sold, as the powers-that-be here in Guernsey say that it is not suitable to use GRP for such boats. They want to spend twice as much as he pays for his pilot launches for a fisheries launch that they say may be used once a week.

I also know that the harbour master in Jersey is very disappointed that he did not also buy two new cranes so that he can look at them standing idle most of the time like the ones in Guernsey. It is obvious they only needed one, so why buy two? They have a mobile crane as a back-up anyway.

For near on 30 years I have flown small planes and was trained to always park them into wind, not least because the wind can catch the tail and spin them round. Also, if it is powered by a gas turbine, which most of the planes I flew were, then they should be started up into wind to stop the turbine overheating or causing compressor stall, which damages the engine. But our airport ignores this because they paid a shed-load of money to have and use permanent stands – usually facing the wrong way – except when it is very windy when they have to use self-positioning, which is more convenient for the passengers as they then have closer access to the doors and not requiring push-back trucks, so cheaper, quicker, safer. So why, you may ask, do we spend more for a less useful system? Many European airports with way more flights than Guernsey have self positioning.

Money passes through the hands of the Guernsey administration like sand through a sieve. Was someone having a joke when they tell me that the prison has spent £250,000 on a system to stop drones dropping things into the jail?

Don’t you just get the feeling that the island could be better run? Unfortunately the sun will have frozen over before this happens.

G. M. OLDROYD,

St Martin’s.