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Workers bought sugar from supermarket to slow cement flood on Victoria Line
- a3n 13y agoApparently sugar in cement is a thing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sugar+concrete https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sugar+concrete Sugar retards the setting process. Of course people who work with concrete would know this. I think we've just been given a glimpse into the lore and practices of a foreign profession.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- melloclello 13y agoI remember my dad telling me about working on a site where the homeowners had decided they wanted a brown concrete driveway to match the house - and subsequently used a large amount of brown sugar to colourise their cement. It never set.
- JetSpiegel 13y agoI like to think that was discovered when somebody was eating a cake or something next to cement mixer.
- kens 13y agoWhat technology are they using for signaling? From the photos, it looks like a bunch of relays connected with a bunch of red wires, but it must be more advanced than that.
- objclxt 13y agoIndeed it is - the Victoria Line uses ATO (automatic train operation), so nearly all of the train operation is automated. The system has been running since the 60s, you can read more about it here: http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/Victoria%20Line%20ATO.htm http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/Victoria%20Line%20ATO.htm
- rosswilson 13y agoLondon Underground use a number of signalling systems, here's a good resource to get started learning about them: http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/signalling.htm http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/signalling.htm However, ultimately you could develop a super intelligent system using networked PLCs, but at the end of the day you're still going to need relays to actually switch the power to the coloured light signals. The red wires in the photos will lead to a controller somewhere that triggers the relays to switch the mains power on/off to the signals.
- hyp0 13y ago> The only word for it is a f∗∗∗ up of major proportions. Everyone was f-ing and blinding when they realised what had happened. It's certainly more fuck up than farce, but what does what does "f-ing" and "blinding" mean? (Australian here) But the key issue - in everything - is not whether you make mistakes, but whether you fix them. This one was fixed.
- pcrh 13y ago"f-ing" and "blinding" means cursing and swearing. The "f" being obvious and "blinding" is a substitute for "bloody".
- dcminter 13y agoActually I believe "blinding" is for "blimey", a (rather dated) contraction of "blind me." If that seems a little odd then you have to recall that blasphemy was once stronger than biological cussing. I'm told that the reason for some of the stranger grammatical usage of "fuck" in swearing is down to its substitution for religious words (e.g. "fuck you" for "damn you.") The chapter on swearing in Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue" is interesting and very amusing.
- pcrh 13y ago"Blimey" does seem more likely. The urban dictionary has it as a contraction of "God blind me", which is presumably what you meant by your reference to blasphemy.
- timthorn 13y agoHence "cor blimey"
- icebraining 13y agoThere's also Stephen Burgen's Your Mother's Tongue, which is a whole book dedicated to European invective (in different languages). It's fun to see how the history of each culture shapes how people swear. For Edam example, it's much more common in Catholic countries to swear by blaspheming in a very strong and direct way.
- ukandy 13y agoLuckily it wasn't racks of digital gear with fans. I can imagine someone thinking they had underestimated the quantity of cement needed as it drained into this room.
- tlrobinson 13y ago"TfL today came under fire for initially informing commuters the line closure was due to “flooding”" Technically they weren't lying, they just didn't say what material was doing the flooding.
- chris_wot 13y ago"That is partly the truth, which is the same as a lie by omission." - Jean Luc Picard
- raverbashing 13y agoThe real question is how they just went pouring cement there without regards for what was in there.
- Anderkent 13y agoThey were pumping it into an escalator void and apparently it burst through into the room.
- dasil003 13y agoI took the tube instead of cycling that day and was kicking myself because I so rarely take the tube. When I saw the pictures I thought 10 to 1 they don't have it open by morning, but they did. They deserve credit for getting it cleaned up (or at least operational) in < 14 hours.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThat is pretty intense. I am not sure how you would know that your forms were going to leak that badly, but if you're pumping concrete from the street above its going to be under a lot of pressure when it gets down to the bottom. If they hadn't caught it (and I assume it was actually a flood alarm that went off in the cabinet) you would have been faced with carving the equipment out of a solid block of concrete and that would have been bloody expensive and slow.
- sifarat 13y agoThat's enough humans. Robots! come over.
- davidgerard 13y agoThe best bit of this is that the story of the cement flood was broken by viral clickbait site UsVsTh3m (a commercial thing from the people who run b3ta). They actually scooped everyone, and everyone used their photos. http://usvsth3m.com/post/74285062011/you-wont-believe-why-the-victoria-line-is-currently http://usvsth3m.com/post/74285062011/you-wont-believe-why-th... (My loved one used to work for the Tube. She says those photos would have been the actual incident report photos.)
- gfodor 13y agowould have loved to be in the room when they realized what had happened
- Zenst 13y agoFor those like myself wondering why sugar was used and how it helped this situation then I found this URL most enlightening:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10594718/Why-sugar-helped-remove-Victoria-Line-concrete-flood.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10594718/Why... "Concrete is made using cement, which is a combination of crushed and heated limestone, clay and gypsum; aggregate, such as gravel and sand; and water. Adding water causes a chemical reaction called hydration, where hydrogen from the water combines with calcium, sulphate, aluminium and silicon from the cement. This releases heat and depending on the proportions of each of these minerals, which hydrate at different rates, can set at varying speeds. Sugar, however, is composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms which can interfere with the hydration process by binding with the minerals and slow down the reaction."
- gog 13y agoWow, I had Ghostery paused and this web site loaded over 50 resources that would otherwise be blocked. 109 JS files clocking over 3MB.
- jspiros 13y agoI'd imagine this works similarly to how a slice of bread in a bag of cookies keeps the cookies chewy, as the sugar attracts and holds the water from the bread, and keeps the cookies from drying out. Something to do with sugar being hygroscopic.
- vxNsr 13y agoAnd now I know how to keep my cookies chewy, thank you jspiros.
- judk 13y agoI don't understand Mike White's and Boris Watch's jokes.
- DanBC 13y agoLondon Underground lines have names. One of them is the Circle line. They are shown on the map in colours. "Blue circle" is a brand of cement. It's a week joke kludging these things together.
- shangxiao 13y ago"It's stupid more than anything. I guess stupidity has ruled the day here." Gotta love people weighing in with their expert opinion.