As some of you may already know, I've taken a week's work experience placement at the Environment Agency to make up for the two weeks of work expeience I did at Budgens, organised by the school ¬_¬

Anyway, I got in about 7/4s of an hour ago and have been given the desk of 'Matthew Lee' who is apparently away for this week. It has a swivel chair. This makes me happy. The Team Leader's name is Graham and he had some things setup for me to do this morning (or so I've been told) however he's been called out on 'Flood Watch' (not quite sure what that entails but I'd like to believe it involves more than just watching the floods) and so before I can really do anything, I've got to wait for him to get back. Meanwhile, one of the team members, Claire, is helping me out with stuff even though she's a little busy answering all the phones on account of her being the only member of the team still here.

As usual, my dad's given me crazy amounts of food to eat for lunch so I'll give you an update if I don't manage to eat myself to death.

Update 1:
Well lunch came around and we went to a talk on Dyslexia and how to accomodate it in the workplace. It was actually quite interesting and I learnt a few things about it.

After lunch in the cafeteria we got back and Graham was there - nice to see he didn't drown or something.

Anyway Claire took me out to investigate a fly-tipping report. Apparently a load of stuff had been dumped outside a sewage treatment facility. Obviously just dumping rubbish anywhere is illegal under the Environment Protection Act but on top of that it was reported that some Japanese Knotweed had also been dumped along with it. Dumping that stuff anywhere that may cause it to spread is a violation of the Wildlife and Countryside Act because it's so invasive and so whoever did so was in for a bit of a fine if they were caught.

So we drove along to a sewage treatment plant and wandered around for a bit trying to spot this fly-tipping but we couldn't find any in the reported place. Claire thought that the company may have gotten rid of it already since it was right outside their gate so we went in to see if anyone knew. We found one worker who helpfully informed us we were at the wrong plant >_<

When we got to the actual sewage treatment plant the fly-tipping was quite obvious. There was at least a couple of transit van loads worth of wood, metal frames and even a toilet and sink. The Japanese Knotweed was there too so we had to search around for any evidence of who'd dumped this stuff. Unfortunately the bin bags we searched through only had random juice cartons and roof tiles but no bank statements or anything.

So the only thing we could do was to call the council to clear the stuff up and tell them about the knotweed. Bit of an anti-climax really but it was cool to attempt a bit of detective work.