EXAMPLES
Example #1: Consult the document APP1-LVIA for Loch Eishort 2 and go to page 15 where you will find two photos of the view across the loch from Glasnakille, one of them with a naive image of a fish farm added. On past experience, this scrappy little so-called photomontage will be rejected by SNH, who will advise the applicant to provide a more competent effort, but for the time being this is what they have supplied for our edification. Why the applicant tries on this trick every time and every time is instructed to submit a competent photomontage and even then fails to get it right, who knows? The point is that if you check the location of the proposed fish farm between Tokavaig and Tarskavaig (maps on pp. 4 & 6) you will see that the applicant has placed their diagrammatic version beneath the cliffs south of Achnacloich (which they can't spell - pp. 28, 29, 30 - nor, for that matter, 'Tarskivaig', pp. 23, 26, 29 etc.).
Example #2: Consult the document AMENDED LVIA for Loch Slapin (the application was refused - see 'Decison Notice' below) and go to page 33 where you will find a table that includes a column of figures labelled 'Distance to proposed Slapin site (m)'. If you check these distances you will find they are all pretty well accurate except two of them: Suisnish Track (1630 m) and Suisnish Path (2060 m). The former actually measures less than 1000 m and the latter a little more than 1000 m. Now, why should such significant discrepancies have slipped into an otherwise accurate set of figures?
Example #3: If you are a biologist you will 'enjoy' consulting any of the Seabed Video Surveys (sometimes referred to as ROV Reports). These documents starkly declare their own lamentable inadequacies of field work, biological science and report writing, and should be dealt with in the manner of a harrassed school teacher marking an indolent youth's homework. Incredibly, for years work of this appalling quality has been allowed to slip through the planning process unchallenged ... until now.
Example #4: Consult any of the seabed survey reports mentioned in Example #3 and you will find maps showing fish farm layouts with superimposed the proposed and actual trajectories of the three routes travelled over the seabed by the ROV camera. As you will see, to varying degrees but in every instance, sometimes veering disastrously off-course, the ROV did not follow the routes intended. This is only half of the story. If ROV routes are re-plotted using co-ordinates read off the video footage (which, believe me, are disaster movies!) they can be seen to wander all over the place. The three straight lines shown on each 'actual' diagram have been plotted by drawing a line wiith a ruler between the ends of what were actually rather wiggly, disjointed journeys. This seems to be a routine 'methodology', which resulted in, in one case, the ill advised line drawing exercise actually making the fake transect line worse than it really was!
Example #5: Applicants transparently use copy/paste when constructing a new document, a practice which becomes increasingly apparent when we compare one application's documents with another's. Not only do the same text, spelling errors and bad use of English get routinely transferred from document to document with each copying event, but if we look carefully we can find data, even place names, left over from previous applications; information referring to (left over from) irrelevant localities. One exasperated Skye resident checking fish farm application documents wrote: “I’ve been doing some comparisons between the two applications....and quite frankly I have never seen such balderdash.”
