Looking up the length of Great Britain, I discover that there's a place in Cambridgeshire called Holme Fen that is ten feet below sea level.
I get how that could happen in the desert, but in England???
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
We've been doing hydraulic engineering for hundreds of years. I think we have imported expertise from The Netherlands, where they depend heavily on it...
Mike.
It was drained using steam-driven pumps in 1851.
Jeroen Belleman
Jeroen Belleman wrote in news:r5q9gf$o83$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:
Then they filled it back with an even worse, more sinister fluid... humans.
The fenland peat has shrunk over the centuries, as it dried out. There's the famous cast iron pole at Holme Fen
There are many places in the fens where the river is higher than the surrounding countryside.[1]
Between Earith and Downham Market there are two straight parallel waterways (the Old and New Bedford rivers a.k.a. the Hundred Foot Drain) about 500m apart and 25 miles long. The sluices at Downham Market are closed at high tide, and the area between the rivers floods until low tide.
The latter diurnal flooding techniques are also used on the Somerset Levels.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.5115556,0.2604779,3a,75y,231.97h,67.11t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sPSA4Uui0ezgk9u40pcPE5w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
A good Lord Peter mystery is The Nine Tailors, centered around a great flood in the English lowlands.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc Science teaches us to doubt. Claude Bernard
I grew up three blocks from the Mississippi river. We used to look up at ships on the other side of the levee.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc Science teaches us to doubt. Claude Bernard
I saw the BBC version when I was a kid--that's the one about pretty Mrs Grimthorpe and her sinister husband, right?
I'm not a big novel person these days except for mythopoeia. The most recent work of fiction I read was "Wonder Tales" by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany. (I'm not sure whether the bluebloods' names are copied from the prize pigs, or vice versa--he sure could write though.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
No, that one is Clouds of Witness, where Wimsey's dim brother stands trial for murder in the House of Lords.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc Science teaches us to doubt. Claude Bernard
Yeah, but why does it stay dry? Have they kept pumping for 170 years? My back garden is a former pond bottom, so I think about such things. (I have a deeply committed relationship with my storm drain--it's 12 inch ID, and runs across the lot, under the street, and about 300 feet down the street before it reaches the level of the municipal drain.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
Ah, OK. I was confused by the fact that the Grimthorpes lived in the middle of the fen.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
Maybe they built clay walls around it to keep the water out. The opposite of a pond? It also depends on where the water table is. (ground water level.)
I need to do some 'hydraulic engineering' on my gravel driveway. The 'upstream' trench needs to be dug out. I've got an old tired backhoe and as long as I take it easy it should be a fun job.
Does your storm drain clog? 12" ID sounds big! I've got a number of ~4" drain pipes under my drive way. And this ~2" diameter thick walled plastic tube. That a jam into the exit and entrance holes if/ when a pipe clogs.
They also make these cool water powered (from a garden hose) balloon expanding things that you can send down smaller pipes and blow 'em out with water. The end of the hose is a nozzle and then the expanding part, at full water pressure the balloon expands and wedges into the walls of the pipe. As the nozzle is spraying water into the obstruction.
George H.
Well, yes, I suppose so. That's the way it's done in the Netherlands. It doesn't take all that much. A few hundred kilowatts can keep a huge area dry.
Jeroen Belleman
ace
Huh? What??? Is there no rain in Great Britain?
I had that conversation with someone in a newsgroup once. Seems in Netherl ands they have a great deal of land reclaimed from the sea. Yes, they have to have dikes to keep out the sea, but they also have large ponds to catch the rain water and pumps to pump it into canals leading to the sea.
If Holme Fen is not near the sea I suppose they can pump the water into a r iver.
-- Rick C. - Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging - Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
That is just a fleeting moment in England's long history.
In Somerset there are areas of land at, or just below, *average* sea level. The water is pumped into rhines (canals) slightly above the land level and large lock gates are opened to empty it at low tide. Then the gates are closed to prevent the high tide flooding back.
It's just like deriving a negative supply from a sinewave centred on, or just above, zero.
-- ~ Adrian Tuddenham ~ (Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply) www.poppyrecords.co.uk
England is a famously rainy place that gets little sun. I'd expect it to fill up with fresh water pretty fast.
It needs to be big. In Hurricane Floyd we had eight feet of water sitting over the drain.
We've had the roto rooter guy check it out a couple of times, but it's been fine for 60 years so far.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs (second-longest tenure on his block--30 years this coming December)
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
Ten feet is a long way for a tidal system. BC and Nova Scotia get tides like that, but most places don't. Plus it depends on the phase of the moon.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
If you drain swamps - fens in East Anglia - they dirt underneath dries out and contracts, and the surface drops.
The Dutch have been it for a few thousand years now, and that is why a lot of the Netherlands is below sea level. They came over to Eng;and and did the same job in East Anglia a few hundred years ago.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Before that they used windmills, exactly as the Dutch used to do.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
I see a 3.4m tidal range every day - or at least I did before last week. Storm surges can add another metre so that it flows over the top of lock gates in the city center.
I also see the river suddenly get up to 2m deeper (with surfers travelling upstream) and start flowing backwards.
But that is on the other side of the country, the River Severn.
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