Chalgravesteve

No bigj you misunderstand me. I don’t mean your house will be the eyesore. I’m sure yours will be spot on. It’s the shite mess that someone else wants to put up on an adjoining plot that everyone else has to see, even if you don’t as you have walled yourself in with trees, because if you can buy a plot of land cheaply and build what you like then so can everyone else. Who controls what can be built, where, and what it looks like. Oh. That’s planning laws.

But ultimately, if you got hold of the land as cheaply as you want and build your perfect home, but on the plot next door that you will look at for the rest of your life, the guy builds an absolute shite eyesore, you would want something that stopped him doing that. You cannot surely just be advocating that anyone can build anything anywhere? So you want planning laws that suit you, not the ones that don’t. And a kit home from Poland, doesn’t sound to me like a self build. That’s a self assembly of a building developers building!

Base rates won’t return to 5% in the next decade in my view. Rates have been so low for so long that the short term benefit gained when interest rates dropped for those that were borrowing, and that is a vast number of small businesses, has long since been absorbed by increases in other areas such as fuel etc. So the return to 5% interest base rates would crash the economy quicker than Brexit ever could..... note: under no circumstances should thus become a Brexit thread, I’m considering deleting the above post because of that

And the problem with a decent %age of “affordable” housing is that it’s “afforded” through housing benefits! I dont have an answer to the problem but it can’t be s solution to give people free money to live in sn affordable house!

So, bigj, you reasonably expect people to pay your prices for your products/services and you cover your costs and make a profit. How does that differ from the house builder then ?

But it’s not is it? The land cost £x build the new house and it gets sold. So it’s market value? If its artificially inflated no one would buy the end product because it would be above market value.

Now I’m baffled. It’s you that is missing the point. So you can afford what you want at market rates, and you said there was a place within 20 miles of you. You have a successful business and yet, what you covet most highly, a property that is best for you, your family, and your future, you don’t go and get? What has been the point in being in business for so long then? You want to be the richest person in the graveyard? All because you don’t want to pay market rate to someone you think has too much money already. Madness.

Yes it is an interesting thread and the viewpoints of various contributors will be differing by age and/or financial restraints, depending on whether they have benefited from the "boom" or not. The current stagnation in the housing market, in my view, is nothing to do with brexit. It is more a revaluation of property due to one thing, the major change in the way that buy to let and rental income taxation has changed. For the past decade or so, the boom in buy to let was fueled by the ability to deduct pretty much all of your maintenance costs including interest on a buy to let mortgage, before the balance became tax deductable as income. The result was that people could start with one house for rent, and then add others to increase their portfolio as they could afford to do so, funded by the ones they already own. So the first time buyer and the mid range houses were all being snapped up by the ever increasing number of people getting buy to lets. The massive competition and demand for houses boosted house prices upwards. With the changes that have come in, in the past few years, it is significantly less attractive to get a buy to let mortgage as in many cases it will not fund all of the outgoings, or the profit left after tax and expenses makes the acquisition of more houses less attractive. The market though, has not corrected itself downwards yet though, so the first time buyer is still being offered properties that are priced because of boosted prices and whilst they have significantly less competition from those wanting to buy to let, they still can't afford the price as it is now. Equally, the owner of the property who wants to sell, won't sell at a lower price than they paid unless they absolutely have to. So you have a stagnant market at the moment which doesn't show any signs of picking up soon. A crash in house price values may be good for those wanting to get on the housing ladder, but comes at the cost of those that have managed to get on the ladder in the past 5 years or so, as they will go into negative equity and we have been there before on that one! In the medium term, wages will pick up and will close the gap on the house prices if the market remains stagnant. I saw a report which said the bank of Mum and Dad was now the 7th biggest lender in the UK, as those with high value property try to assist their kids getting going.

But as soon as you link any future resale value to an open market rate, when the property is not available to sell on the open market, then you have a distorted gain, particularly for the first owner (which must impact upon the price paid by the second surely?). So the only way to do this, that maintains the original principle of the philanthropic land donation (and as someone else pointed out, this could be achieved through state owned land (or land owned by the church as they are one of the biggest landowners of all)) is to remove the house price increase profit element from the equation. The recipient/custodian of the property gains a property at an affordable rate and the property remains permanently tied to that principle. Someone who moves in and as their life/career progresses becomes more able to afford a "normal" house, can move out and do so.

The "unproductive pasture" is your view of it. The landowner is not obliged to sell it. Money isn't everything. Just because you want to pay double the market rate for agricultural land, doesn't make it an attractive deal for the landowner. They may prefer to keep it for their 12 cows and the open view, rather than have some cash which earns them nothing in the bank. The only way that this would work, would be if there was a philathropic donator of the land, who would forgo the potential earnings for themselves, and allow you to buy at a reduced rate. In turn, the uplift in value should be returned to the next user of the property, so when you move out or die, the property reverts to the philantrophic trust and they put it back out as a low cost property for the next user. If they allowed a notional uplift in value whilst in your "ownership" equivalent to the amount of return that you would have had, had you had the cash in the bank instead, then you won't have lost out on the uplift in your savings money value but you won't be gaining the property uplift value (at the next owners expense) either! I'm sure there won't be many takers though under that scenario!

The problem here though, is that small parcels of land for relatively low value is no good for the seller. If they sold 3 acres for say £50k/acre (but that land has negligible original price value - say £1k acre from decades ago) then the capital gain is almost all of the value. So they sell for £150,000 then they might pay as much as 28% CGT on the sale. So they are only potentially getting £108K for the land. Unless they absolutely need to sell it they don't. So its never just a straightforward set of values. There's more to it than that. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said you should buy land, because they don't make it any more......

The land might be second rate pasture, but the moment your get a planning consent on it to build a house with outbuildings, its not second rate pasture any more and its significantly more valuable. Again, I'm not trying to be clever and the planning laws at times are mad. However, without a planning restriction that prevents houses just being built on second rate pasture, that lovely view across the valley wouldn't be a lovely view anymore! So whilst I understand your sentiments, there has to be an acceptance that land you can build on is substantially more valuable. If you can get a planning consent for a detached house, permitted development right immediately allow you to put a 4m single storey extension onto it, or 8m if there are no neighbour objections! So when they grant a planning consent for a house size A it can almost instantaneously become substantially bigger through permitted development.

I'm not being sarcastic or trying to be clever or anything. An honest and straightforward question really: So if you owned it at the moment, would you sell it to someone else for £300,00 or whatever you think is not loopy money, instead of taking whatever the market determines as its value? If someone pays £650k for it then it must be worth it? If no one does, it will reduce in price until someone does go for it?

Gallup/Roundup etc all smell like that so you don't drink it by mistake or even contemplate eating or drinking whilst using it. You can only dispose of it safely by using it for its intended purpose in my opinion. If you chuck it down a drain, or into a watercourse you will kill aquatic life or wildlife. An animal grazing on grass that has been sprayed with the correct dilution will likely get ill, so realistically, put the lid back on, and get a small sprayer and spray your patio or driveway until its been used up.

Gravity plays a huge part. The reason the reservoir overtopped was that the volume of the inflow exceeded the capacity of the outflow. If you leave the plug in your bath and the taps running, then the bath will continue to fill. When it reaches the overflow, if the volume coming into the bath exceeds the speed at which gravity takes it down the overflow, it will continue to fill, and once the water gets above the overflow then the volume of water going through the overflow will increase due to increased water pressure. Eventually, if the inflow continues, the water will reach the edge of the bath and the thing will overtop. to stop it, you turn off the tap and the overflow will quickly recover the position. In the case of Toddbrook, it stopped raining at the volume that caused it to overflow. It can only continue to overflow at that rate if the volume of rainfall coming off the hills keeps pushing it into the reservoir faster than the gravity safety valves can handle it. Once the inflow slows down, it will stop overflowing reasonably quickly. The pumps and the rest of the gear all came after in my view, when they had decided quite correctly that the dam was possibly unstable and could collapse and so the bulk of the volume needed to be reduced as well.

I don't have any axe to grind with either side of the argument, I'm trying to view it logically and see if one argument (for more/better maintenance and drain it earlier) stacks up against it being an entire unpredictable event. I can understand why they would hold the water level at close to maximum if they can in August (which must be predicted to be the time of most use and least rainfall), but maximum level on a reservoir is NOT just below where the spillway would start to flow, it would be at least 1m below that? One would assume that the lack of potential replenishment for the reservoir in the event of a drought period would be in the mid June to Mid Sept period. Therefore, by 1st August, the reality is that they need to be able to guarantee no more than 8 weeks of use from the volume retained, as the natural rainfall and replenishment should be active by late September again. My own small reservoir has an overflow pipe that starts to flow when water is within 50cm of the top of the bund, and we can open that overflow to max which takes it back down to 80cm within an hour. Given that the only way that it fills up is from rainfall actually landing on the surface, or our own pumps, that is easily manageable. The volume is also manageable. It holds 9,900 m3, but has a useable volume of around 8,500m3 max. Potentially I can need 60m3 per night to irrigate the golf course or more in drought conditions. So if i need to irrigate every night between 1st May and 30 September I need 9180M3 or more. But I can abstract 20m3 per day for 365 days a year, so in the same period I can add 3,000m3 to the reservoir (provided that its not filled to the overflow). So it is all about managing the inflow against the demand. When you look at the maps, and see that Todd Brook is what flows in to fill the reservoir, and that there is a weir part way along the northern edge which is a man made channel which then flows around and below the spillway (the spillway discharges into the same channel) and that channel was flowing very fast and deep before the spillway overtopped. I can only conclude that the volume of water that was dumped from the sky, in a very small, very specific area, which then all flooded down into the Toddbrook reservoir, was an absolutely off the scale one off event. If the volume of water was more widespread, I didn't hear of any of the other reservoirs in the immediate location (and the very useful map shows 5 in total) coming under any threat at all. Eggs, you even say yourself in this post, that the Goyt had only just gone into flood. So, for one single reservoir to get hit by such a volume of water in such a short space of time is absolutely impossible to predict. Ultimately, the spillway had been inspected, and passed. Clearly when subjected to extreme forces, it failed and the consequences of that failure must now surely have ramifications across the whole network. I just cannot see how anyone can just take a simplistic view that it was a lack of maintenance and they should have drained it earlier. On the same basis they should have drained the other 4 reservoirs in the are as well, but they didn't fail or even overtop? It was a combination of way more factors than that, and a "perfect storm" that almost ended in a catastrophe. The upside of this of course is that it has been a massive wake up call to CaRT as well as anyone else involved with reservoir storage, that the overflows and mechanisms for draining need reviewing and bringing up to standard. Incidentally, on one of the overheads of the spillway, there appears to be an outlet/overflow pipe exit to the right of the spillway. There is certainly a man made channel there, but I don't recall seeing any water flowing from this either before the spillway failure or as a mechanism for draining the reservoir.

Absolutely right, and you have forgotten the underground streams and aquifers that also contributed to the local area being overwhelmed with water. The fact is, that 100mm of rain in August would not have come close to breaching it. 100mm in a week might have started to get harder. 100mm in a few hours, across the whole catchment, all being funnelled into one single location, a giant bath with no plug and only an overflow to protect it

I can’t believe you don’t get this! I don’t know the reservoir or the way that it discharges to the canal network. I’m sure we are in agreement that you cannot pump the water out of the reservoir into the canal network. In order to empty the reservoir they had to bring in emergency pumps from the emergency services. That would appear to confirm in my mind that once the water is impounded into the reservoir there is no means of getting it back out. There is no drain/pump system to the goyt otherwise surely they would have used it! It seems entirely logical to me that there should have been a direct discharge pipe or pipes from the reservoir to the goyt. Open the gates and let it drain, just like pulling the plug on your bath. So to drain it earlier, you have to commandeer the local sports ground, mobilise the emergency services, and do all of the stuff they have had to do since the spillway failed, all on the basis that they might get 100mm of rain in August! Im happy to be corrected on this but everything I’ve seen and read so far gives a clear indication in my mind that once the water is in the reservoir, the only way it’s coming out when it’s below the spillway, is via the outflow to the canal system. But for 180 years it’s not needed a direct flow to the goyt. But because the spillway failed and potentially the bank below the spillway was eroded or compromised, they had to pump the water out (currently less than 15% full I believe now) because if the bank behind/below the spillway collapsed then the whole reservoir was going to discharge into Whaley Bridge any solution they come up with for the future surely has to include a means of draining it to the goyt without having to bring in all those pumps

Once one of those slabs moves or cracks or drops, that’s it done. The water will just tear it apart. I worked out earlier that I thought the reservoir has a surface area around 100,000 m3 If the water cascading over the spillway way was 30cm deep and it looked at least that, then there is a volume of 30,000m3 that’s coming over that spillway in the hours that follow. That’s 30,000 tonnes of water travelling at speed. Once it’s through any weak point it will tear it apart. I wouldn’t call that a red herring. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But they could have cleaned and polished that spillway and brought it caked for its birthday but in that extreme circumstance it might still have failed. The only way that the whole thing could have been avoided would have been for the inflow to have been diverted before the reservoir overtopped the spillway. Im not disagreeing with anyone that maintenance could have and should have been better. The owners/operators should have done a better job. The inspection engineers should be more stringent, especially in the light of other dam spillway failures. But people are also expecting them to predict the impossible. In the past 50 years since they built that spillway, how many times previously had it been overtopped by anything? Probably never or only a few inch deep trickle. The normal full level of the reservoir will be some distance below The spillway That allows additional emergency capacity. I’d be amazed if it’s normally closer than 1m from max water to the spillway. That’s 100,000 m3 of extra water from the infill before it’s full to maximum. Thats the equivalent of 1000mm of rainfall in a few hours. If you double the catchment area, that’s 500mm of rain in the same period. Double it again and it’s 250mm. The area had 10/15mm of rain predicted. So it’s just my view that the combination of circumstances created a scenario that no one could have foreseen. The spillway then couldn’t stand the forces involved and failed. Its clearly not fit for purpose and a repair is not viable, needs a complete new modern engineering solution that enables the reservoir and dam to withstand the same or worse circumstances, because you can predict it now. It’s happened once so clearly it could happen again.

I don't disagree with any of this - except that if the engineering inspections say its all OK, why would they query that? The experts whose job it is to inspect and ensure the safety say its all ok! You would expect the engineering inspections teams to be absolutely aware of the California spillway failure and to be more stringent on inspections on anything constructed in a similar manner or a similar age etc. All we are doing of course, is speculating on what might have happened and what information people might have had. The one thing I really don't think anyone could have done, is accurately predict the volume of water that cascaded into the reservoir in the first place. If the wind had blown that storm 50 miles to the east or west, it would have saved 10 pages on an arbtalk forum as well as the reservoir!

That's the whole point though. Unless you are suggesting deliberate negligence, no one knew or expected that the slip way would fail. Why would they? What crystal ball do you have that they dont have, so you know it was going to fail before it did? Their expectation is that it will do the job that it was built and designed for, 50 years earlier. Even if they allowed the reservoir to continue to fill once every year or so, until the water overtopped the spillway and flowed down it, the volume of water passing down the spillway in that "test" would be nowhere near the volume that came over in the storm. You cannot simulate that storm because the normal inflowing river only carries are certain volume of water in and the same volume would flow out over the spillway in the same time. As someone said earlier, if Cart had emptied the reservoir because a thunderstorm was predicted and then it rained for a bit but there was now not enough water for the canal network, they would have been ridiculed. I would have thought that if they tried to use the canal network to empty the reservoir into (as they must have some mechanism for getting water out of the reservoir and into the upper reaches of the canal to top it up all the time - is that gravity or pumped?) there is no way that the canal network could absorb that volume of water because of lock gates and sluices etc. Its a system that needs a controlled level of water. The river Goyt on the other hand, is more capable of handling a higher level of waterflow, Clearly though, given the fact that they have been pumping water out of the reservoir for a week, there is no direct controlled gravity feed discharge from the reservoir to the Goyt. They might be able to divert the inlet source but once its in the reservoir they appear to be stuck. You would hope that whatever solution they come up with to make the bank above Whaley Bridge safe, and the spillway safe, that this would incorporate a means of being able to discharge volumes from the reservoir safely.

One thing with concrete, once its in place and surrounded by more concrete, is the friction between pieces is absolutely immense. You try breaking up a concrete driveway. You might crack it but you cant lift pieces out. Once you do make a hole though, it starts to work the other way, the weight of the concrete and the void underneath means that a piece can fall and what was previously seemingly impossible to break now snaps because its brittle. Those photos that I've seen of the damaged spillway, don't appear to show reinforcing bars or mesh in each slab, so its "just" concrete. Once the spillway surface is breached for whatever reason, with that level of water passing over it, there is only going to be one outcome, unless the water flow stops.

thats Ram-a Dam

I'm only giving you my opinion on what I've read and what I know about reservoir design (having actually had a reservoir designed and built for me). I do know that there is a mandatory requirement for inspection on an annual basis and I think I'm correct in saying that an independent reservoir panel engineer has to inspect at least every 10 years. I'm also reasonably sure that I've read somewhere that an independent panel engineer said there was nothing in photos taken prior to the failure that caused them concern and I also think there was a report saying that an IRP engineer inspected and passed the reservoir (which would include the spillway and and any vegetation growth on it) in April of this year. I'm happy to take on board other peoples views, I was interested in the thread in the first place because of the design issues that came up in my own project and I felt I had something to contribute. I hadn't considered that the lack of maintenance might apply to the lower network of canals resulting in a reservoir being kept over full in order to ensure that there was sufficient water for the canals, rather than the reservoir itself. Clearly if you are lost for words about my comments, you have personal knowledge of the site, the extensiveness of the vegetation and the fact that trees have grown through the spillway slab and rendered it ineffective. If you do have that level of actual factual knowledge that the spillway was fatally damaged before the storm and the overtopping, that might amount to negligence for individuals and the CaRT and that is an extremely serious matter.

I don't see how they have "let the slipway fail"? I would struggle to believe that the slipway was originally constructed with a void underneath it, if there was a void there all the time, then surely there would be a means of access to that void to ensure that nothing was happening in the void out of sight? So, logically, there shouldn't be a void and the concrete slabs and edges are a reinforced area, on top of the reservoir banking, designed to handle the water from the emergency situation where the reservoir overfills and overtops, so that catastrophic erosion and collapse doesn't occur. I think that with the events of the past few weeks, there is every chance that the reservoir bank itself, made from soft soils and loose aggregate, under the slipway has become damaged through erosion. Clearly they cannot take the risk that a repair to something that has clearly failed once, and a repair onto something that might be unstable as well, so they need to do a rebuild job. If I was them, I would be removing a section of that banking and rebuilding the whole thing in concrete where the new water spillway will go. I would be putting hydraulic sluice gates into it at the same time, so that if you ever had to reduce the water level again, quickly in an emergency, you can do so by opening the gates and controlling the outflow through and an area that is designed to withstand the forces involved, instead of having to lay countless pipes around and over the edge and pumping it out. Open the gates and let gravity do the work for you. I would be putting a double gate on all sluices, and not relying on one gate. In the meantime, the inflow is blocked and what would be entering the reservoir is directly flowing into the river/canal system? As we move into the winter/high rainfall periods, this might put low lying areas close to those water courses more at risk than they were previously, because the reservoir is not there to absorb short term high volumes of rainfall as it has done for the past 180 years, until they have rebuilt the overflow spillway.