Water, water... but not always where it’s wanted
LET’S think about water for a moment. In this country it’s generally in the wrong place, in the wrong quantities at the wrong time!
It is the responsibility of a quite dizzying number of agencies and organisations with the result that its management is at best haphazard and, at the worse, chaotic. In fact, where water is concerned in the UK, there would appear to be little or no joined-up thinking!
Generally speaking we have a surplus of the stuff on the west side of England and a shortage on the east, especially where drinking water is concerned.
Schemes abound to move the surplus from one side of the country to the other, with one of the more imaginative examples standing to benefit a waterway under restoration.
In this instance the abandoned Thames & Severn Canal would be employed to slake the thirst of Londoners, while breathing fresh life back into one the country’s most beautiful waterways.
Further north, the Pennines embrace a whole series of reservoirs, some of which feed our upland canals, while others water large industrial populations in the foothills and further afield.
Fear of unprecedented rainfall, brought about by climate change, means that the authorities responsible for their upkeep are reluctant to maintain them at capacity, leading to a greater chance of summertime hosepipe bans.
And always there is the threat of being caught out so that, with little provocation, sluices are raised in the face of forecasts of severe precipitation, swelling the navigable waterways that they feed into further downstream.
Work gets done in the form of elaborate (and expensive) schemes to ensure that flooding is avoided in the areas surrounding a river’s headwaters, speeding excess water on its way, while downstream communities suffer the increased likelihood of flooding and navigations are closed to traffic.
Taking a case in point: the Aire & Calder Navigation, four miles or so west of Goole, where a serious breach has recently completely closed the navigation to all traffic, both commercial and leisure.
A culvert carrying surplus water from the low-lying countryside to the north of the waterway, under the canal, to be pumped into the Dutch River on the south side appears to be the likely culprit.
Repairing the culvert (or indeed any repair that continues to employ the tidal Dutch River) retaining it as a means of disposing of storm water from the local countryside and adjacent motorway system, means that an already overloaded and silted channel continues to struggle with the disposal of water from ever more frequent extreme weather events.
A simpler solution is to abandon the culvert altogether, and the future risks it poses to the integrity of the navigation (this is in fact the second breach here within a period of 50 years) and simply pump the surplus water straight into the canal, eliminating the culvert altogether.
You see, the salient facts are twofold. At Goole Docks, which the waterway supplies, there is always a shortage of water for the large shipping that lock in and out of the River Ouse. Locks which can, incidentally, dispose of large volumes of surplus water into the river without so much as breaking sweat.
The second fact is that upstream of the point where water travelling through the suspect culvert is pumped into the Dutch River (or the River Don to give it its correct upstream appellation) is the community of Fishlake, notorious for the serious flooding that its residents have endured following previous extreme weather events.
So here we have a situation where Associated British Ports (ABP) want as much water as they can get, while the good burghers of Fishlake would rather see considerably less of the stuff.
Orchestrating the final outcome is the navigation authority – Canal & River Trust – who are tasked with making the engineering decisions that ultimately dictate where all this surplus water finally finishes up. Only right now, they don’t seem able to join the dots…