Latest news with #Bullough
Powys County Times
19-05-2025
- Health
- Powys County Times
Powys river bathing site has exceeded safe bacterial limit
WALES' first designated river bathing site, in Powys, was found to have exceeded safe bacterial limits last year. As the official bathing water season begins, campaigners are sounding the alarm, after it was found that Wales' first designated river bathing site – the Warren in Hay-on-Wye – exceeded safe bacterial limits on nearly one in three test days in 2024. With swimmers already in the water, campaigners are demanding that Natural Resources Wales (NRW) urgently investigate the source of the contamination, including whether the faecal bacteria is of human or animal origin, before more people fall ill. Oliver Bullough, an author and journalist who led the bathing campaign for Friends of the River Wye, said: 'Sadly, winning bathing designation was just the start of the process to clean up the Wye, and these figures prove beyond question that the river is in crisis. 'The Welsh Government now has a legal responsibility to make the Warren safe for swimmers, and it is time for NRW to trace this pollution to its source and prevent it.' Powys man denies posing risk to another man with a knife Cyclist dies after crash with van on Powys A-road Last year, the Warren became the first inland bathing water in Wales to gain official designation, requiring NRW to monitor water quality throughout the summer. But results from testing by NRW, Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, the University of York and the Friends of the River Wye reveal repeated safety breaches. These include: E. coli exceeded the limit (900 CFU/100ml) on 6 out of 28 days Intestinal enterococci breached the threshold (330 CFU/100ml) on 7 out of 26 days On 8 separate days out of 29, one or both bacteria exceeded safe levels 'These are not just statistics, they are a public health red flag,' said Mr Bullough. 'Just this month, one of our local schools warned parents that pupils had reported getting sick after swimming at the Warren, which showed once again that this problem is urgent.' Amy Fairman, head of campaigns at River Action, added: 'These findings are deeply worrying, they show exactly why bathing water status matters; it gives us the data to sound the alarm when the public is at risk. 'Now NRW must act. The source of this pollution, whether sewage, farm runoff or both, must be traced and tackled. People have a right to swim in clean rivers and regulators must make that right real.' With the 2025 season now underway, campaigners are calling on NRW to urgently explain what they are doing to trace the source of the pollution and restore the river to safety. The Warren has been a swimming destination for over a century, marked as a 'bathing place' on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1888. Official designation was meant to safeguard the public. That safeguard must now be enforced, with the public having a right to clean, safe water, and regulators have a duty to act.
Otago Daily Times
05-05-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Rum jewel of Inner Hebrides
Julie Orr-Wilson discovers another Scottish island full of quirky history and nature. As our ferry docks in Rum's harbour, above us tower the Cuilins and the unique geological peaks of Askival and Hallival. Formed nearly 3 billion years ago, it's some of the oldest rock in the world. Dominating Loch Scresort's shore — and of much more interest to me — is Rum's eccentric Victorian oddity Kinloch Castle, a mass of pink Arran sandstone. The Isle of Rum was one of the earliest human settlements in Scotland. It is thought Mesolithic man came, possibly attracted to the rare bloodstone used as an alternative to flint. Christian hermits followed in the 7th and 8th centuries, before Norse domination. By 1266 it was back in the hands of Scotland and came under the Lord of the Isles' rule. Crofting and fishing communities continued until the 1820 clearances. In 1845 the Marquis of Salisbury purchased Rum as a sporting estate, but it was George Bullough, of the Lancashire textile Bullough dynasty, whose wealth, privilege and entitlement, enabled him to fulfil his desire to create a grand hunting lodge on the island. It is this era on Rum which is so intriguing and helps to set it apart. Fliss, our host for the island's B&B, meets us at the wharf; accommodation-wise, other than this there is either a bunk-style lodge or the more extreme restored Dibidil shepherds' bothy, an 8km trek across rough terrain. Exploring the village — which is run-down in appearance — it's hard to make sense of community dynamics, and where the 30 locals might fit in. We relax at the Village Community Hall; everything happens here, with coffee, salmon baguettes and proprietor Kim's fresh coconut cake, before taking the Kinloch Castle guided tour. The castle is opulent and impressive; the Great Hall, even after all these years, still sings out for a party. It feels as if the last private owner, Lady Monica Bullough, has just left, despite her selling to the Scottish Nature Conservancy over 60 years ago. The castle is now a faded glory in varying states of decay, sadly crying out for care. Bullough oddly enlisted commercial London architects to develop plans for a four-squared, turreted two-storey dwelling, complete with a conservatory for the ladies to stroll on all the bad-weather days. At a cost of £250,000 it took 300 men three years to complete — suggestions are that to build it now would cost more than £15 million ($NZ33.34m). It featured state-of-the-art bathrooms, air conditioning, water turbine electricity, central heating, double glazing and was complete with an external telephone system, the first of its kind in a private residence. But the extravagance didn't just end with the house itself. The setting also incorporated 250,000 tons of Ayrshire soil, which was used to create paths, avenues, lawns, a bowling green, a nine-hole golf course, a fernery and a Japanese garden complete with bridge. There were also hothouses for grapes, figs and peaches, where hummingbirds flew and turtles floated in tanks (it is said the alligators that were also briefly installed were shot because they might interfere with the comfort of the guests). When divorcee Monique Ducarel de la Pasture — who was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was of French descent — married George on Rum in 1903, there was major redecorating. To this predominantly male bastion she added her feminine touch, along with a kitchen full of French chefs. This was a place fit for a king. Prince Edward stayed here, along with many other high society guests. Hunting was the main focus — the Bulloughs were renowned for shooting anything — but was balanced with lavish balls and musical entertainment. What went on in private rooms, full of circumspect. The extravagance and frivolity ended abruptly with World War 1. George's beloved steel yacht Rhouma became enlisted as a hospital ship. The days of peacetime brought the Bulloughs back, but their annual three-week stints dwindled. When the heating malfunctioned, the plants and hummingbirds died. Fewer staff led to overgrown gardens, collapsed conservatories, and a dry fountain. dry. By 1939 the castle was quiet. After dinner with Fliss — no restaurants here — we spend the evening in the otter hide. It's a woodland walk, passing through the ancient ruins of an old village, on which one hopes to spot a shy otter or basking shark. We earnestly watch for hours and see a few grey and common seals but are finally rewarded when the slice of a dorsal fin appears — a surfacing minke whale. In awe, we watch it blow. We hire bikes from Fliss at her craft shop — it's almost a one-woman band on the island — and bike the 13km single road uphill to Harris. This original road, constructed for George and his chums to race their sports cars from Kinloch to Harris, required a staff of 14 to keep it maintained and raked. We pass lochs, burns, sweeps of rough peat bogs and pastoral grasses where zebra-striped ponies, directly linked by ancient bloodlines to Przewalski's horse (the stockily-built, smaller, and shorter wild horse of Central Asia) roam. We free-wheel down to Harris Bay; there's white-tail eagles overhead, and we can still make out the long lines of lazy beds (an historic form of cultivation) where crofters' potatoes grew. In the distance, incongruous to this wild seascape, is George Bullough's Greek-style mausoleum, originally for his father, John, but now George and Monica's resting place too. As the story goes, John made the money and George spent it. Further up the hill is the original tiled tombstone, which George's friends had joked was reminiscent of a public lavatory. Insulted, George responded with the grander Doric temple. It's a fine resting spot among field gentians to eat Kim's packed lunch. Making good time on our 20km round trip, we turn off to the other side of the island and Kilmory Bay, a long stretch of pale sand and views over the sea to Skye. It's sobering wandering the remains of the black-house village. We pay our respects to the Matheson family graves. Here in 1871 Murdo and Christina Matheson lost five children to diphtheria; those remaining emigrated to New Zealand in search of a better life. This end of the island is favoured red deer pasture and base for the 40-year red deer research project, run in conjunction with Cambridge and Edinburgh universities. We chat to one of the resident researchers who is out with her binoculars and claims she's tracked us all day, but promises at critical moments they make a call, "on the hill", which means one must look away. There's venison stew for dinner before we head out to the hall for ranger Trudy's comprehensive talk on Rum's status as a National Nature Reserve. Diamond-shaped Rum is introduced as the jewel of the Inner Hebrides. A small audience includes a gentrified 82-year-old English climber who impressively has just spent days out in these hills with her younger beau. Browsing the books, I'm tempted by Bare Feet and Tackety Boots, Archie Cameron's account of his boyhood on Rum, but a copy of Eccentric Wealth is a must, the history of Kinloch Castle captivating me more. It's hard to shake off the thought that tomorrow we will walk past Bullough's stronghold for the last time. Rum, it's wonderful. It's weird.
Vox
05-04-2025
- Automotive
- Vox
Why are car headlights so blindingly bright now?
is a producer for daily news podcast and radio show. Before joining Hady worked in public media as an editor, reporter, and producer. Glaringly bright, blue-hued headlights filled my hatchback earlier this year as I drove 80 miles an hour on the highway between San Antonio and Austin. The headlights shone so brightly that their reflection in my rearview mirror burned my eyeballs, causing me to look away from the road and rapidly slow down. The large luxury SUV behind me began riding my tail — causing an even more intense glare to engulf my car — before aggressively whipping around to pass me. For a moment, all was fine. My eyes adjusted. And I began to pick up speed again — only to be visually assaulted by a lifted truck with even brighter headlights and flood lights atop its roof, then an electric vehicle with the whitest lights I'd ever seen, and an onslaught of others. Fearing my car being slammed from behind every time I was forced to slow down and look away from the road, I got off the highway and took an alternative route. The headlights felt like they'd become especially hard on my eyes in recent years. Maybe I was just getting old, I thought, or my eyes had been weakened by working on a computer for a living. Then a listener of Vox's Explain It to Me podcast named Reed called and asked, 'Am I going crazy? Or does every new car on the road have the world's brightest headlights? I'm wondering why this is suddenly happening? And are there any limits? Can people just put whatever they want on the front of their car and blind everyone else?' He wasn't alone. Our show has received multiple emails with similar inquiries from listeners and Vox readers. And there's even a subreddit dedicated to the topic, where people complain, make jokes, and work together to find solutions. So in hopes of helping Reed, myself, and the many other upset drivers, Explain It to Me took on Reed's question. Are car headlights getting brighter? There are two ways to answer that question, lighting scientist John Bullough, who leads the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Vox. The first has to do with the color of LED lights, the kind now overwhelmingly used in car headlights. 'You've probably noticed that a lot of them look a lot more of a bluish white compared to the yellowish white of halogen headlights,' Bullough said, which used to be more common in headlights. The concepts we use to measure light intensity — lumen and candela — were created by scientists long ago, and don't fully align with how different parts of our vision have different sensitivities to different-colored lights, Bullough said. That means that even though a light meter might say a pair of halogen headlights has the same light intensity as a pair of LED headlights, our eyes will see the bluish LED one as brighter because it's more likely to be picked by our peripheral vision, making our brains prioritize it as important or alarming. The second factor, Bullough said, is that the intensity of headlights really has increased over the last 10 to 20 years. 'If we think about the reason we have headlights, they're not to create glare — they're to help us see things along the road so that we can avoid collisions,' he said. But the result has been that moves to make cars safer for their occupants, like the ever-increasing size of American vehicles and the increasing intensity of headlights, have created a new set of safety problems for anyone outside the car. Who's responsible for the brighter lights? 'Headlight intensities have actually been increasing in part because of things like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's safety ratings,' which the insurance company-backed nonprofit doles out to help customers choose which car to buy, Bullough said. Carmakers also use the ratings as a selling point. When IIHS first started evaluating headlights nearly a decade ago, 'they were giving headlights pretty poor grades in terms of their ability to help us see things at night.' Of 95 car models tested by IIHS in 2016, just two earned a good rating. A desire to improve safety ratings, combined with the growing dominance of LEDs in the broader lighting market, has driven carmakers to rapidly brighten their lights. 'LEDs are a new technology that took over pretty much everything in the lighting world in the last 15 years. It's arguably the biggest change in lighting technology since they first fired up an incandescent light bulb,' said Nate Rogers, a freelance writer who wrote an extensive story in 2024 about headlight brightness. 'LEDs are more energy efficient. They last longer. It was a total sea change in the lighting world when LEDs came out, and over time they've started to replace pretty much everything, and that includes car headlights.' But Rogers also believes the federal highway safety czars, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), share some of the responsibility for why bright LED lights have become the norm on roads. 'They are the ultimate authority,' he said. 'Any car that is driving on the road has to meet NHTSA standards.' 'Several people I spoke to [from NHTSA] told me that the most complaints from drivers that the NHTSA gets are about car headlights [and] headlight brightness,' Rogers said. But NHTSA has not created rules to limit the intensity of bright lights.' Nor do federal safety ratings for car models consider the safety of anyone outside the car, as Vox contributor David Zipper explained last year — only the safety of a given car's occupants is included. Are brighter lights actually dangerous? During his reporting, Rogers said, he never really found anyone disputing safety concerns tied to headlight glare. While he was often pointed to an IIHS study finding a 19 percent reduction in crashes for cars that have good safety ratings for their headlights, he added, it's really hard to track whether or not someone else got into a crash after being blinded by another driver's headlights. 'Without that strict measurement of how dangerous car headlight brightness is, it seems that NHTSA is a little stuck and a little unsure about how to fix it,' he said. Driver safety is just one aspect of the problem. The other has to do with people sharing the roads — pedestrians and cyclists. The number of people killed by cars while walking has risen precipitously in the US in the last decade: According to a new report from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), pedestrian deaths are up 48 percent from 2014. Another GHSA report found that in 2022, 'approximately three-quarters (77%) of pedestrians killed in fatal crashes were struck at night.' Mark Baker, founder and president of the advocacy group the Soft Lights Foundation, which aims to protect people from the harmful effects of LED lighting, thinks headlight intensity, in addition to the increasing prevalence of large cars on American roads, might be linked to the uptick pedestrian deaths at night. He theorizes that drivers blinded by bright headlights at night struggle to see pedestrians, and pedestrians may struggle to see as well. 'There's just way too much light now,' he said. 'Nobody can see you.' Baker has lobbied Congress to get a hearing on the adverse impacts of LED headlights, and he's tried working with states to pass laws limiting headlight intensity. He has yet to score a victory, but has gotten more than 70,000 people to sign a petition called 'Ban Blinding Headlights and Save Lives!' 'I have filed two petitions to the federal government: one to set a limit on maximum intensity,' Baker said. 'Right now there is no overall limit on maximum intensity. And then there's no limit on the blue wavelength light. That's the most debilitating light. It causes glare in your eyes. It's harder to see. It's also hazardous to our eyes.' The fight is personal for Baker. 'I got knocked out of teaching,' he said. LED headlights on the road and in his classroom tormented him — an experience that eventually led to a diagnosis of mild autism. 'I couldn't go to work,' he said. 'So I started devoting my time to try and figure out what's wrong with these LEDs. I've since met other people that have similar reactions so severe that they're considering thoughts of suicide because it's just it's torture for those of us that have autism.' Will we ever stop headlight glare? So if safety ratings incentivize carmakers to equip new cars with bright LED headlights, what do we do? There are a couple of solutions that could help protect drivers from glare, Bullough said. The first has to do where headlights are aimed. The light that comes from low-lights, the lights we drive around with most often, should be pointed down and toward the road, and not into the rear window of cars. But headlights can become misaligned after they've been replaced, or after accidents. 'Headlight aim is something that some states, but not most, actually require as part of their safety inspections,' Bullough said. 'So drivers could ask their mechanic once a year to have their headlight aim checked and to adjust it if needed.' Headlight aim is often especially poor with older cars that have aftermarket LEDs on their cars, automotive and tech journalist Tim Stevens said. He thinks better enforcement of traffic safety laws could help. 'A lot of states like Michigan, for example, don't have any kind of annual inspection at all,' he said. 'So it becomes an issue for the police to basically pull someone over if they think that someone's headlights are too bright.' NHTSA could also create headlight intensity limits, which state and local authorities could then use as a baseline for enforcement, Bullough and Baker pointed out. 'Certainly what could be done is some upper limits on the overall intensity from low-beam headlights,' Bullough said. Stevens said carmakers are introducing new technologies that could help with the problem, like high beam assist or adaptive beam technology, which are supposed to dim headlights instinctively and automatically when the cars are coming up on traffic, pedestrians, and dark corners. 'It's been available in Europe and in the rest of the world for quite a few years,' Steven said. 'It's only been made legal in the US since 2022, but because it takes a long time for auto manufacturers to bring new technology to market, it's still taking some time for them to be able to bring these new headlights to the American market.' For now, he added, the tech 'is only going to be on the newest and highest-end cars. So it's going to be a long time before we see this on the majority of cars on the road.' There are other tools and techniques that the average person can use to deal with headlight glare, like looking down and to the right while driving when there are bright lights passing you, or picking up a pair of blue light-blocking glasses. But Baker believes meaningful change will only come through civic action. 'The empowerment comes from listeners contacting the government, contacting me, joining up with the Soft Lights Foundation, and getting involved,' he said. 'Let's fix this systemic problem.'
