Their task was to remove London's sludge waste from Beckton and Crossness for disposal on the ebb tide at sea, at Black Deep, an extremely deep part of the North sea located fifteen miles off Foulness, on one of the main approaches to the Thames Estuary.
Great Wakering village hall and the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club at Burnham-on-Crouch were prepared as reception centres, and a flotilla of small boats, the lifeboat, a barge and an army DUKW amphibious truck reached the stranded people and evacuated them to the reception centres.
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In winter, hen harriers can be seen foraging, and a wide range of plants and invertebrates thrive there.
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The island's name is derived from the Old English for wild birds and promontory, and it is an internationally important site for migrating and breeding birds, including avocets.
In the 1960s, the Ministry of Defence proposed to move its main artillery and explosives testing facility at Foulness, at the mouth of the River Thames, to a site between Burry Port and Kidwelly, which was already used in a very sporadic way as an air-to-ground rocket range.
Foulness |
The Black Deep begins in open sea east of Foulness Point and south of Clacton-on-Sea and is bounded by two substantial sandbanks, the Sunk Sands to the north-west and the Long Sands spread out to the south and east (which have some wind turbines).
Reviewing it in 2012 in io9, Jess Nevins characterized the work as "the worst science fiction novel of the 19th century", outstripping all other bad science fiction of that time in "unreadability, cliché, and thematic foulness".