Readers' letters - July 7

With regard to people’s comments about the water shortage (LP July

4).

Has nobody realised the situation is only going to get worse?

More and more houses are being built and more and more water is going to be needed to supply them.

More water will have to be extracted from the lakes and more valleys, including their villages, will have to be flooded to form more reservoirs.

Today it is a water shortage, tomorrow gas and electricity.

The root of all these problems is the population explosion in our country. The population of the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, are:

n 1851 - 27 million

n 1951 - 50 million

n 2018 - 61 million

n 2050 - predicted to reach 78.4 million

How is the population of the UK to be controlled and limited?

That is a big question.

Realist from almost built-up Garstang

We used to be proud of police

In my profession, if I “cleared up” 4.8 per cent of my work, I would be laughed out of my job by myself, never mind those who paid me.

What is possibly more worrying is that the best rates in Essex are 26.1 per cent, so, in other words, three out of every four crimes remain unresolved, even in the best results.

Perhaps it would be cheaper if we didn’t bother with policing burglaries and robberies, lowered our financial contribution to the police and bought a shotgun, like the Americans do!

We used to be proud of our police force and respected them, what happened?

Max Pierce

Via email

Chorley FC will suffer now

I have been going to Chorley FC games for 60 years and I am disgusted at the way Chorley FC is being run.

To lose a manager who has achieved so much in a short time is disgusting. He has won promotion cups on a small budget and is one of the best non-league managers around. We were getting bigger gates than some of the National League. Now Chorley will suffer.

The chairman must go and take Dave Riche with him. It takes a lifetime to build a castle and one minute to destroy it.

Ben Fryson

Chorley FC Fan

Moor fire raises fracking fears

Having watched the plumes of smoke from the burning Winter Hill moorland travel 20 miles plus in next to no time, I am very concerned about this.

The Environment Agency has complained that air monitoring around the Preston New Road fracking site is proving difficult due to the vagaries of wind direction.

So how can we trust the agency with the far more difficult yet important task of precise measurement of toxic emissions from there when the constant fracking /flaring commences any time soon?

Don’t forget we probably won’t be able to smell or see the airborne toxins being inflicted upon our families.

Peter K Roberts

Warton