Whaley Bridge Evacuated

[daveatdave]

16 minutes ago, eggsarascal said:

Google the name Duncan Fife if you want it from the horses mouth.

 

The rain played a part but lack of maintenance is the underlying problem.

just like the bridge at Tadcaster it had 10ft budlears and other foliage  growing out of the buttresses which I believe the CaRT were responsible for     

[eggsarascal]

5 minutes ago, daveatdave said:

just like the bridge at Tadcaster it had 10ft budlears and other foliage  growing out of the buttresses which I believe the CaRT were responsible for     

CaRT are a shambles with zero interest in maintaining a 200 year old infrastructure, they've been caught out dozens of times lying about maintenance. I wouldn't trust a word that comes out off Parry's, or his staff mouths. They are another example of a registered charity that are all in it for their own ends. They did away with lengths men who looked after a certain length of the cut and replaced them with spotters who's only interest is logging boats that have over stayed. It's criminal that these people can get away with what they are doing to a very profitable asset.

[Paul Cleaver]

3 minutes ago, eggsarascal said:

CaRT are a shambles with zero interest in maintaining a 200 year old infrastructure, they've been caught out dozens of times lying about maintenance. I wouldn't trust a word that comes out off Parry's, or his staff mouths. They are another example of a registered charity that are all in it for their own ends. They did away with lengths men who looked after a certain length of the cut and replaced them with spotters who's only interest is logging boats that have over stayed. It's criminal that these people can get away with what they are doing to a very profitable asset.

CART - Don't start me off -  The amount of money they want for pruning 3rd party trees  overhanging the canal + a public foot path  that's no where near the site = £700.00 - Profiteering bastards - if they would have said £200 I would have gone with it, but as they said £700 they can fuck right off and have nothing  -sorry im on the gin 

[Chalgravesteve]

2 hours ago, eggsarascal said:

I'm afraid this is nonsense, back in the day when there were local  lengths men the inlet to the res would have been diverted directly to the cut feeder, locks opened and boat movements restricted/stopped. The reason the damn was breached in such a way is CaRT were slow to react. Don't believe the crap that CaRT are trying to lead people believe. A mate of mine has put in a FOI request. I'll update when he gets a reply.

It’s not nonsense it’s physics and capacity. If you had diverted the huge amount of water coming down into the reservoir directly into the overflow system of canals and rivers then you would have had breaches and flooding downstream in substantial areas. 

 

Its the same as filling up your bath or sink. Once the water reaches the level of the overflow, then it self regulates BUT if the incoming flow is greater than the capacity of the outflow, then the bath continues to fill until it flows over the side. Then the water is going everywhere instead of where it’s planned to go. 

 

If you divert that volume into a canal, even if you left lock gates with sluices open, there is not the downstream capacity to absorb that volume of water without breaches. Add to that there are people living on boats on it! 

 

What they are doing now, is discharging the water from the reservoir at a controlled rate into the overflow system without breaching it

 

It clearly all works. I don’t disagree that lack of maintenance has not played its part on the spillway. But the spillway was not, I’m sure, envisioned to have to have the incredible volume of water flowing over it. How far do you over engineer something to make it safe? Clearly it’s not been breached like this since it was built so you are looking at a once in one hundred years plus set of circumstances 

[eggsarascal]

19 minutes ago, Chalgravesteve said:

It’s not nonsense it’s physics and capacity. If you had diverted the huge amount of water coming down into the reservoir directly into the overflow system of canals and rivers then you would have had breaches and flooding downstream in substantial areas. 

 

Its the same as filling up your bath or sink. Once the water reaches the level of the overflow, then it self regulates BUT if the incoming flow is greater than the capacity of the outflow, then the bath continues to fill until it flows over the side. Then the water is going everywhere instead of where it’s planned to go. 

 

If you divert that volume into a canal, even if you left lock gates with sluices open, there is not the downstream capacity to absorb that volume of water without breaches. Add to that there are people living on boats on it! 

 

What they are doing now, is discharging the water from the reservoir at a controlled rate into the overflow system without breaching it

 

It clearly all works. I don’t disagree that lack of maintenance has not played its part on the spillway. But the spillway was not, I’m sure, envisioned to have to have the incredible volume of water flowing over it. How far do you over engineer something to make it safe? Clearly it’s not been breached like this since it was built so you are looking at a once in one hundred years plus set of circumstances 

There are several designated overflows between Marple and Bosley locks that would have come into play before any breach occurred, these could have been utilised yet weren't. The Trust panicked and did something rather than doing nothing, what they did was make a rash/wrong decision. The people of that area have called for a public enquiry, it will be interesting to see the outcome of that.

Edited August 6, 2019 by eggsarascal

[difflock]

I am with Eggs on thissun, re the systematic lack of maintenance, lying about the lack of maint and its effects, then making poor decisions in a impending crisis, and then lying about that too.

Based on local observations.

Good luck with the public enquiry.

[Chalgravesteve]

7 hours ago, eggsarascal said:

There are several designated overflows between Marple and Bosley locks that would have come into play before any breach occurred, these could have been utilised yet weren't. The Trust panicked and did something rather than doing nothing, what they did was make a rash/wrong decision. The people of that area have called for a public enquiry, it will be interesting to see the outcome of that.

I'm sure that there are additional overflows etc that would have come into play.

 

I don't know the area or the canal/river network, or the background of CaRT. It is true to say, in my view, that there have been a number of organisations that have adopted a "charity status" to oversee the management of previously public owned facilities, which gives them a massive taxation advantage that they didn't previously enjoy as a "normal" organisation. In many cases, the board/exec officers are very handsomely paid, so the setting up of a "management team" to take over of the running of an organisation that they can't afford to buy but then don't have to, and then voting themselves much higher salaries out of the new surplus from the lower tax regime! Very little overview on this.

 

With regards to actual reservoirs though, there are stringent regulations (as you might think) in the maintenance and inspections of these. My main business is a golf club and in 2009 we constructed a small reservoir to store water for irrigation purposes. Originally, the reservoir was designed to hold around 15,000m3 of water. As a result of proposed changes to the Reservoirs Act, we reduced that to just under 10,000m3 capacity, as anything above 10,000m3 was then going to require annual inspections and testing by independent third parties. This was going to be ridiculously expensive for a small reservoir.

 

There are two types of reservoir, non impounding and impounding. Mine is a non impounding, which means that there are no water sources that feed directly into the reservoir, and all the edge slopes away from the top bund slope away from the edge, so that there can be no water run off from rainfall. The only way my reservoir can fill, is from rainfall actually landing on the surface, or me pumping water into it from an abstraction source.

 

The Toddbrook reservoir is an impounding reservoir. It is filled from river that enters the north/western end, which in turn collects run off water from the surrounding area. So its rather like a tap, except that a tap normally has a maximum amount of water that can pass through it. The surface area of the Toddbrook reservoir is about 100,000m2 by my rough estimate. The spillway would normally be at least 50cm ABOVE the standard full level, so in order to start flowing, there reservoir has the ability to store an increased amount above its normal holding capacity before it starts to overflow. So for the reservoir to rise by 2m in height, 200,000,000 litres have had to flow into it. It would be really rare as well, in my view, for a reservoir to be at its upper limits in July/August, although if its sole purpose is to be the header tank for the canal network I suppose that that might be possible. 

 

So put this into perspective. Rainfall on the reservoir on its own, cannot do that. If you get massively excessive rainfall, lets say 6" in old money or 150mm, in a few hours or even over a couple of days, what that actually means is that the volume of water that has fallen from the sky, is 150 litres per 1m2 which will raise the level of the reservoir by 150mm, assuming that there is no outflow. This wouldn't even bring it up to the spillway. The ANNUAL average rainfall for the whole of the UK is 885mm. The news reports were talking about getting 1 months rain in a few hours, maybe 4" or 100mm. so the reservoir would only increase in depth by 100m! 

 

Except that, there is an uncontrollable flow entering the reservoir from its impounding river. The river is collecting water like a giant funnel from the surrounding area, massively increasing the catchment and volume and chucking all of that into the reservoir. If the increase was (and clearly it was) sufficient to fill the reservoir "spare overflow" capacity to the point where it overtopped the spillway, then the volumes are really not manageable. The damage would have been caused as the reservoir continued to fill, increasing the steady trickle over the spillway into a raging torrent of several feet depth, with enough water still coming down off the hills to keep pushing it over the top from behind. If you turn off the tap, the bath stops filling immediately! They are pumping out water and dropping the level by 2m every 24 hours. The incoming water raised the reservoir at at least the same sort of rate as that! 

 

Had the Toddbrook reservoir not been there, it would be extremely likely that the areas downstream of where it is now, would have suffered extensive flooding. The reservoir held the excess capacity and it was not until the spillway gave way that there became an issue, at which point you are really in trouble! 

 

So irrespective of the current lack of proper management or the way that it is run by CaRT, the engineers who built it 180 years ago, managed to do so in a manner that dealt with a once in 180 years event and its still standing!  

 

 

 

  

 

 

Edited August 6, 2019 by Chalgravesteve

[openspaceman]

47 minutes ago, Chalgravesteve said:

there have been a number of organisations that have adopted a "charity status" to oversee the management of previously public owned facilities, which gives them a massive taxation advantage that they didn't previously enjoy as a "normal" organisation. In many cases, the board/exec officers are very handsomely paid, so the setting up of a "management team" to take over of the running of an organisation that they can't afford to buy but then don't have to, and then voting themselves much higher salaries out of the new surplus from the lower tax regime!

This is very much my view, not only of charities running previously publicly owned facilities.  We have a local example where  small charity with no employees came into a lot of money which has provided a sinecure for one of their number for the last 8 years for no public gain.

 

It's like running a family business  with none of the risks, no shareholder's to answer to and set your own wages.

[David Cropper]

1 hour ago, Chalgravesteve said:

I'm sure that there are additional overflows etc that would have come into play.

 

I don't know the area or the canal/river network, or the background of CaRT. It is true to say, in my view, that there have been a number of organisations that have adopted a "charity status" to oversee the management of previously public owned facilities, which gives them a massive taxation advantage that they didn't previously enjoy as a "normal" organisation. In many cases, the board/exec officers are very handsomely paid, so the setting up of a "management team" to take over of the running of an organisation that they can't afford to buy but then don't have to, and then voting themselves much higher salaries out of the new surplus from the lower tax regime! Very little overview on this.

 

With regards to actual reservoirs though, there are stringent regulations (as you might think) in the maintenance and inspections of these. My main business is a golf club and in 2009 we constructed a small reservoir to store water for irrigation purposes. Originally, the reservoir was designed to hold around 15,000m3 of water. As a result of proposed changes to the Reservoirs Act, we reduced that to just under 10,000m3 capacity, as anything above 10,000m3 was then going to require annual inspections and testing by independent third parties. This was going to be ridiculously expensive for a small reservoir.

 

There are two types of reservoir, non impounding and impounding. Mine is a non impounding, which means that there are no water sources that feed directly into the reservoir, and all the edge slopes away from the top bund slope away from the edge, so that there can be no water run off from rainfall. The only way my reservoir can fill, is from rainfall actually landing on the surface, or me pumping water into it from an abstraction source.

 

The Toddbrook reservoir is an impounding reservoir. It is filled from river that enters the north/western end, which in turn collects run off water from the surrounding area. So its rather like a tap, except that a tap normally has a maximum amount of water that can pass through it. The surface area of the Toddbrook reservoir is about 100,000m2 by my rough estimate. The spillway would normally be at least 50cm ABOVE the standard full level, so in order to start flowing, there reservoir has the ability to store an increased amount above its normal holding capacity before it starts to overflow. So for the reservoir to rise by 2m in height, 200,000,000 litres have had to flow into it. It would be really rare as well, in my view, for a reservoir to be at its upper limits in July/August, although if its sole purpose is to be the header tank for the canal network I suppose that that might be possible. 

 

So put this into perspective. Rainfall on the reservoir on its own, cannot do that. If you get massively excessive rainfall, lets say 6" in old money or 150mm, in a few hours or even over a couple of days, what that actually means is that the volume of water that has fallen from the sky, is 150 litres per 1m2 which will raise the level of the reservoir by 150mm, assuming that there is no outflow. This wouldn't even bring it up to the spillway. The ANNUAL average rainfall for the whole of the UK is 885mm. The news reports were talking about getting 1 months rain in a few hours, maybe 4" or 100mm. so the reservoir would only increase in depth by 100m! 

 

Except that, there is an uncontrollable flow entering the reservoir from its impounding river. The river is collecting water like a giant funnel from the surrounding area, massively increasing the catchment and volume and chucking all of that into the reservoir. If the increase was (and clearly it was) sufficient to fill the reservoir "spare overflow" capacity to the point where it overtopped the spillway, then the volumes are really not manageable. The damage would have been caused as the reservoir continued to fill, increasing the steady trickle over the spillway into a raging torrent of several feet depth, with enough water still coming down off the hills to keep pushing it over the top from behind. If you turn off the tap, the bath stops filling immediately! They are pumping out water and dropping the level by 2m every 24 hours. The incoming water raised the reservoir at at least the same sort of rate as that! 

 

Had the Toddbrook reservoir not been there, it would be extremely likely that the areas downstream of where it is now, would have suffered extensive flooding. The reservoir held the excess capacity and it was not until the spillway gave way that there became an issue, at which point you are really in trouble! 

 

So irrespective of the current lack of proper management or the way that it is run by CaRT, the engineers who built it 180 years ago, managed to do so in a manner that dealt with a once in 180 years event and its still standing!  

 

 

 

  

 

 

Well explained!

[Stere]

Quote

We have a local example where  small charity with no employees came into a lot of money which has provided a sinecure for one of their number for the last 8 years for no public gain.

 

It's like running a family business  with none of the risks, no shareholder's to answer to and set your own wages.

Same locally,  one got a few million £ grant  lottery money? but don't seem do that much. Now have atm I think 2 payed  employeed that don't seem to do much of anything.

 

Another different one locally had big grants but run up debts and then went bust. Apparently a few  favoured local contractors were charging them crazy amounts to do  jobs.