4 ms·

Where I used to live, a little north of Glasgow but a little south of Stirling, there was a big flat bit of low-lying ground where a modern housing estate was b

Where I used to live, a little north of Glasgow but a little south of Stirling, there was a big flat bit of low-lying ground where a modern housing estate was built, with a nice little stream at the bottom. The ground was flat because it was the bottom of a loch drained in the 1500s, by a culvert to a river a few miles away. All the rubbish that people threw from their cars washed down the stream, into the wetlands that it flowed through, and eventually began to gunk up the culvert. The wetlands got bigger, the stream got deeper, and by the 1970s the housing scheme had a nice little pond instead of a stream, and cracks in every foundation. It's not as bad as the proposed housing scheme further along the valley, where I have a photo (which I can't find just at the moment, sorry) of the developer's 4m tall sign boards just barely sticking out of a pond the size of the entire fenced-off bit. Don't drain wetlands then build on them, folks. Geology will always win against you.

gerdesj 3y ago
Apparently they were put up to it by a bunch of Dutch engineers. To be fair the engineering is fabulous given how old it is, provided you don't screw with rivers and allow the drainage ditches to silt up. All the farms and older buildings are on mounds. There are loads of modern estates built on the flood plains - it is madness. I live in Yeovil, on the side of a hill, 40' above the brook at the bottom edge of our garden. Just north is Yeovil Marsh (mostly drained but the name is a clue), yes of course people build houses in a fucking marsh! The word Yeovil was originally Gifle (C7) which means bend in a river in old English. There are of course houses rather close to the river Yeo that get very damp with monotonous regularity. Cumbernauld (guess!) looked charming back in 1986, when we drove past. It still looked lovely about four years ago, the concrete had aged beautifully. I studied Civ Eng at Plymouth Poly back in '89 and our first field trip was to Roadford Reservoir with its smart new dam - built for something like 1 in 1000 year events. Sadly 1 in 1000 year events are more common these days due to global warming. Luckily Dartmoor is pretty stable but really big dams could be severely tested in the coming decades. Ironically one of our remedies - the EV is much heavier than the gas guzzler. That means that multi story CPs could become overloaded. However pre-stressed conc. members are bloody strong and shouldn't fail by exploding, so I shouldn't lose too much sleep! Geology, hydrology and meteorology can be jolly unforgiving.

gerdesj 3y ago

Apparently they were put up to it by a bunch of Dutch engineers. To be fair the engineering is fabulous given how old it is, provided you don't screw with rivers and allow the drainage ditches to silt up. All the farms and older buildings are on mounds. There are loads of modern estates built on the flood plains - it is madness. I live in Yeovil, on the side of a hill, 40' above the brook at the bottom edge of our garden. Just north is Yeovil Marsh (mostly drained but the name is a clue), yes of course people build houses in a fucking marsh! The word Yeovil was originally Gifle (C7) which means bend in a river in old English. There are of course houses rather close to the river Yeo that get very damp with monotonous regularity. Cumbernauld (guess!) looked charming back in 1986, when we drove past. It still looked lovely about four years ago, the concrete had aged beautifully. I studied Civ Eng at Plymouth Poly back in '89 and our first field trip was to Roadford Reservoir with its smart new dam - built for something like 1 in 1000 year events. Sadly 1 in 1000 year events are more common these days due to global warming. Luckily Dartmoor is pretty stable but really big dams could be severely tested in the coming decades. Ironically one of our remedies - the EV is much heavier than the gas guzzler. That means that multi story CPs could become overloaded. However pre-stressed conc. members are bloody strong and shouldn't fail by exploding, so I shouldn't lose too much sleep! Geology, hydrology and meteorology can be jolly unforgiving.