Waterwolf

I spent a half year in Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam accumulating cash to pay for graduate school. I have many happy memories, despite having a near-death experience in the workplace. I was hired a bit like a filler-in for a maternity leave except that the baby was the Werelds Grootste Aquarium Tentoonstelling - a huge new exhibition of tropical fish. The extra work was deemed to require an extra worker - me; who would do the grunt work while the permanent staff built aquariums. The centre-piece was the 30-meter-bak: a U-shaped aquarium for tropical-reef fish.  It was a big engineering feat because 30m of glass enclosed 40 tonnes of water and required a substantial steel frame to raise the aquarium to eye-level. We needed to construct a reef: partly to provide some nooks and crannies for the fish and partly to save the punters from having to look through the water at other visitors on the far side of the aquarium.  Someone had the bright idea of carving a rough template in 1m x 0.5m blocks of expanded polystyrene, plastering the slabs with concrete and covering them in coral-pink, green, beige and brown camouflage paint. The result looked convincing but when the tank was filled, the reef peeled off the floor in sections, turned turtle and bobbed to the surface. The density of polystyrene is much less than water: a 3cm thick coat of sand-and-cement isn't enough to compensate. The fall-back was to build the reef-wall from lumps of dull red lava, of which we had a heap from an earlier project. That worked out okay.

There were mishaps.  One evening, one of the electricians dropped a hammer onto the floor of the tank cracking one of the 2cm-thick panes of glass. That had to be patched with a specially cut insert.  It was a joy to watch the Surinamese-Dutch glazier confidently scoring the thick glass with his diamond cutter, tapping the the opposite side and then deftly cracking the glass along each line of the template. It fitted snugly into its silicon-glop mortar.  One afternoon, two waitrons from the restaurant at the end of the exhibition hall were pushing a trolley laden with dirty plates across the building when they disappeared into the ground with a loud crash.  Rotterdam is built on sand - formerly the sea-bed - which makes digging trenches for utilities particularly easy.  But sand has very little cohesion and will wash away quickly in running water.  It seemed that one of the many pipes that serviced the aquariums had developed a leak underground and this had eaten away the sand supporting the paving-flags of the floor.  The concentrated weight of two people and 200 plates was too much for the residual structure and >!KARASH!<

As in all the countries bordering the North Sea, and elsewhere,  the erosion of land by water is an occupational hazard in the Netherlands and they have a word for it - waterwolf. Waterwolf has been central to the development of the Zuiderzee which was a freshwater lake called Flevo Lacus in Roman times. The land was mostly peat from accumulations of sphagnum moss in the marshy margins of the lake and its rivers. The peat has some stickiness and supports a certain amount of plant life whose roots hold things together.  But the peat overlies million-year-old sand. When the people turned from fishing and wild-fowling to trading and banking, the growing population's demand for peat for fuel rapidly outstripped supply and the edges of the lake fell into the water whenever there was a large spill of rain.  Dramatic floods in 1282, 1287, 1362, 1421 extended the lake until the dunes separating it from the fury of the North Sea were beaten into submission and the Lake became a shallow bay full of salt-water. The Dutch have spend some billions of Euros over the succeeding years, especially in the 20thC, to reclaim the sea-bed for agriculture and dwellings.  They will be severely pissed off with the rest of us when the sea levels overtop their dykes.

The 4th power

. . . of the axle weight is proportional to damage inflicted on the road surface.

In the early 90s, when I was working in Trinity College Dublin, we took the 3rd year students on a 2 night field trip down the country. Available car-owning adults would pile 3-4 students into cars and we'd roar along country lanes visiting breweries, mushroom factories, plant-breeding centres and stud farms. Anything and anywhere that could spell genetics. Nobody died, although drink was taken when offered. None of the drivers looked at the small print of their insurance to see whether it covered carrying passengers during the course of work. One year the Professor of Human Genetics had a vital funding meeting in The Office and said he'd catch up with us later. We arrived at our final destination after dark and sloped off the pub. The Prof didn't catch up until almost closing time. Travelling at speed in the gloaming he had struck a pot-hole that bent his wheel out of shape and he couldn't manage more than 50km/h all the way back to town at the end of the field trip.

The Grape [bloboprevs] with its fancy alloy wheels, was particularly delicate w.r.t. potholes and the tires cost 3x more than those attached to my 'umble little Yaris. 

Brainstorm episodes pop up on the RTE front page. The headline people came up with Where will the cash come from to fix the latest crop of Irish potholes? for a wide ranging pothole rabbithole by Paul "Strategic Procurement and Supply Management" Davis of DCU. It's not just about the money, although obvs fixing this perennial political football is. It's topical because Storm Chandra [26/27 Jan 26] whacked out A Lot of minor roads across Leinster and €60m is required for ASAP fixing.I like Paul Davis's ironic style ". . . a reminder that drainage, sub‑base saturation and deferred maintenance are not abstract concepts. They are what you feel through the steering wheel at 30 km/h while hoping your tyre survives the morning"

My 4th Power headline riffs on a linked rhetorical 8min piece to mic from April 2025 could we tax 'supersized' cars to fix potholes? We currently road-tax private cars by CO₂ emissions [in g/km]  from €120 - €2,400 a year. €120 for eVs as if they have zero emissions - although we have  carbon belching power-stations contributing to the ESB grid. where almost all of the >100MW stations are burning Kinsale gas. The state also cuts wheeled megaGas guzzlers some slack by making every car over 225g/km pay 'only' €2,400. Buses tractors hearses & trucks pay at a different [much lower rate] rate.

HGVs are a problem wrt potholes which I've Blobbed before as doing [4th power effect] up to 60,000x as much damage as our humble Yaris.You know this: he crappiest road surfaces are often quite local and associated with the farmsteads with biggest sheds [and by implication the biggest tractors]. I have two good pals who, through no fault of their own, were born in continental NW Europe. Every time, I go driving with them, they tsk tsk as we rattle over a road covered in mud and shite and say that where they came from, farmers are obliged to clean their lumpy detritus off the public road. 

Paul Davis gives some interesting insider info about potholes and water. Surface water maximises the power of passing wheels to carry way bit of the road. You know this: potholes blossom on sharp inside corners unless scrupulous attention is paid to prevent puddles where all tires cut the corner. That sort of drainage can often be maintained with a shovel and was before we started railing against the state to make everything better because we pay taxes.

But schlubbstrukture [= water in the sub-base] is more damaging and harder to fix. When the sub-base is saturated, tires striking even a minor deformity at the surface propagate a shock wave through the foundation that can eventually lead to a sinkhole [Waterwolf prev]. It is waaay easier and cheaper to fix roads pro-actively on schedule in the Summer. Taxing by axle-weight is clearly too frightening a nettle to grasp not least because eVs [the current chimaera for making everything better] are designed with an enormous heavy Li-battery aboard. It's not easy to sort out these competing desiderata, but sending a gang of council workers out in scut-truck half filled with tarmac and shovels should not be part of the solution.

Because we love each other very much MeFi had a Pothole thread over the w/e.  

Addicks & Barker

Y'all have taken H for Harvey on board because that is the hurricane/ tropical storm which is currently stalled over Houston, Texas and giving them a shocking wet hose-down. We in Ireland have been more intimately involved with G for Gert, the tail end of which 2017 hurricane delivered 80cm of rain to NW Ireland last week.  But there is a whole alphabet of hell in the immediate and medium term future for Houston - USA's 4th largest urban area.

That alphabet starts with A for Addicks and B for Barker, as indicated on the map. They are two roller-compacted earth dams - you may call them levees - established 70 years ago West of Houston as flood-control /recreation reservoirs. In the centre of the picture, two red rectangles show the location of through-dam concrete-lined spillways. Economists have intimated that by damping the boom-and-bust of normal precipitation and run-off, these structures have saved the city of Houston about $16 million each year in flood damage claims. Thanks to this reservoir system, a steady flow of water travels right through the centre of downtown Houston in a river called the Buffalo Bayou.  It has become a lung for the city [as in Cork] with parks and cycle-ways for office workers to take lunch-breaks in or cycle to work along. Add an indeterminate morale and productivity value that wouldn't exist if the Bayou flooded several times a year. The issues are explained with his customary clarity by Oroville's Own Juan Browne.  In 2009, it was revealed that the concrete spillways were being eaten away by waterwolf in the same way as caused the catastrophic under-cutting of the Oroville spillway. They think they have fixed it with an expanding polymer solution: let's see if that fixin' works when the water starts to roar through the structure - cavitation anyone?

The whole of SE Texas is pretty much flat. Lake Oroville, in N California, which had it's own watery dramas [bloboprev I - II - III] in the Spring was made by blocking off a natural valley in the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada. Addicks and Barker had no such natural basin and are essentially prairie surrounded by their dams. Addick's earthworks are 19km in extent and would contain a quarter billion tonnes of water if brimful. Barker has a similar capacity within a slightly longer 22km berm. Neither reservoir has ever been close to topping out . . . until this week. At 2am local time on Monday 28/Aug the Army Corps of Engineers opened the floodgates to discharge water into the Buffalo Bayou. Since the complex was built, suburban Houston has spread out to and beyond the two lakes and hundreds of homes are being condemned to a dousing pro bono publico. If this is not done, then Houston and its people are looking at "a 30 foot [9m] wall of water" as the rising water over-tops and destroys the levees like the dykes in any medieval flood you care to name - Nieuwekerk - St. Marcellus - Zuiderzee.  Earth dams, even if roller-compacted, are no defense against running water. Lego - in the woods - on the beach - in the lab.

Tropical storms are damaging because of the wind, but also because they suck water out of the Gulf of Mexico and dump it as warm rain inland. They typically move over, through and off somewhere else and this limits the amount of precipitation to manageable proportions. Stalled by anti-cyclones over the Rockies and Great Plains, Harvey keeps on giving in buckets. A metre of rain has already fallen and at least another 300mm is likely before the end of August. 1300mm of rain in one place will flood all the local low lying areas, even if the height difference is a few metres.  Because the topography in Houston is so flat, water cannot drain away quickly which allows people to walk waist deep through it pushing a canoe full of pensioners without worrying about being swept away.  In mountainous N Italy in 1963, a 'mere' 50 million tonnes of water killed 2,000 people because it was travelling downhill fast and all at once.  If your local news starts mentioning Addicks & Barker in the context of Harvey anticipate a significant rise in water levels and more homeless people and trashed possessions. STOP PRESS: late bulletins last night on RTE were mentioning Houston dams, albeit not by name.

The currently dominant political thinking in the USA, UK and Ireland is that we-the-people don't like big government - if we're working we'd rather pay minimal taxes and stand on our own feet surrounded by our own much desired, and ultimately unfulfilling, stuff. And if we're not working  - because we're old, young, sick, unskilled, under-educated - we don't pay any tax aNNyway. But we love having toll-free trunk roads, free schools for our kids, functional hospitals if we need them. A lot of the infrastructure for these comms, educational, health and security expectations were put in by more public-spirited ancestors . . . and we're not even willing to pay for their upkeep & maintenance. The aging infrastructure maintenance requirement is HUGE and largely unaddressed [e.g. Eisenhower's interstate highways]. Small government also means insufficient inspection and regulation [who needs a lot of idle bureaucrats?] so we get houses built on crap foundations, with dodgy wiring and no fire-stopping between units. I'll mention building on flood-plains tomorrow.

A teetering sixpence

Een dubbeltje op zijn kant [R] is an sculpture / installation on a section of the dyke near Nieuwekerk aan den IJssel in the Netherlands. A dubbeltje is 10c in old money, equal to 2 stuivers. And the phrase means "a close run thing" or "a lucky escape".  When the elements rage and your life and livelihood is threaten with extinction you can run for the hills or pray like the soldiers on the Sea Horse . . . or, like the plain people of Heimaey you can do something about it.  I suggested in the Heimaey piece that taking arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them is a particularly protestant solution to a poor hand of cards.  If you're reading this, you have just survived the night of 31st Jan/1st Feb.  In 1953, something like 2000 people failed to do that and a further 70,000 were so wet and cold that they had to leave their inundated homes. An Atlantic storm and a high tide caused storm surges all round the North Sea which over-topped the sea-defenses in the S Netherlands, Belgium and the East coast of England. It was waterwolf in its most aggressive and destructive power.  The biggest loss of life in the 1953 Watersnoodramp / flood-disaster was in the provinces of South Holland, Zeeland and North Brabant with several islands and polders completely inundated. It was the last big flood in Western Europe to occur with 19thC infrastructure.  The storm happened on the Saturday/Sunday night and civil servants were in bed if they weren't in water: there was no convenient way to call key personnel to duty and no system for alerting the threatened population to move to safety.  As well, the science of meteorology was poorly developed and its predictive power was limited. It didn't help that events peaked in the middle of the long winter's night.  For all the death - 30,000 head of livestock as well as the people - there were thousands of tales of heroism and sacrifice.

It could have been far worse.  The Afsluitdijk [off-shut-dam] separating the Zuiderzee and Nordzee had been recently constructed and was said, in that one night, to have paid for itself in saving the communities round the lake, including Amsterdam from damage. The Schielands Hoge Zeedijk was the main flood wall protecting the 3 million inhabitants of South Holland and North Holland. The rising floodwaters were lapping the top and sought the weakest point which started to give way. Volunteers had been hefting sandbags in the hours before dawn but the local collapse called for immediate and intelligent response to avert disaster. The mayor of the nearest substantial community, Burgemeester J.C. Vogelaar of Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel commandeered the nearest grain barge and ordered it to put its thumb in the widening gap. Skipper Arie Evegroen deftly buried the bows of the Twee Gebroeren in one side of the dyke and the water pressure slammed the rest of the hull shut against the flood. Huzzah! That's him in the sculpture pictured above. He said afterwards that he was sure his small ship would surf straight through and into the polder behind, so he was glad to have his dinghy ready to launch.

The same storm overwhelmed the Stranaer to Larne mailboat the MV Princess Victoria. 133 died and 44 survived; as with the Sea Horse the only survivors were adult men.

Nightmare on Whitchurch Street

Springs springs springs have been giving me work since November. We usually get spongy patches in Winter in the four ~1 hectare fields between us and the river. If the angle of the sunlight is right, the surface water positively sparkles through the boggy grass. But this is the first year I've heard spring water burbling out of a stone dyke between one field and a lower one. Not much we can do: I'm not about to install mole-drains at vast expense in a possibly vain attempt to keep the water flowing away beneath the surface. Just keep tractors and stock off those fields and wait for a dry Summer.

otoh We've put quite a bit of time and treasure into diverting and damping the energy of flowing water bubbling up in the lane to our home-place. It's a finite problem: there are, or have been, 6-8 predictable places where water forces itself up through the stones and gravel of the lane. Years ago we hired John the Digger to trench through half of these springs when they were dry and bury a couple of lengths of perforated plastic land-drain pipe. The pipe was turned sharp right below the last spring and debouched into the drain which runs beside the lane. 

Up above the house [where I care less about the road surface] there are two small places where the lane surface is positively punky. It makes squidgy sounds under your boot and the subsurface yellow clay leaks up through the stones. Nothing as dramatic as the collapse of a laden catering trolley through the pavement [second para] because running water had scooped out all the sand under the floor. Over the years, I've been dumping apple-to-plum sized stones into the sludge and it's gradually firming up. 

On the night of 21/22 December 2025 the Llangollen Canal at Whitchurch collapsed in dramatic fashion [L] completely draining a section of the canal and beaching 3 or 4 house boats several meters below grade. The canal is super picturesque and its Pontcysyllte and Chirk aqueducts have been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.  It was navvied more than 200 years ago but its original coal and iron transport purpose ended between WWI and WWII. Now it's for leisure, pleasure and recreation and some people live on their boats year-round. Neil Jones has been documenting the response to the breach with daily reports.

In that section the canal skirts round a bit of a hill keeping level (as canals must do!) with an embankment on one side several metres higher than the meadow below. You might expect that 'canal breach' involved the collapse of the embankment like a dam bursting. But it actually looks like the bottom of the canal gave out first through waterwolf and the embankment collapsed downwards rather the burst outwards. The owners and maintainers of the canal [that would be the CRT] have installed coffer dam pilings along some stretches of the canal but the canal bottom was originally clay "puddled" to make it water-proof.  In the 19thC labour was cheap and materials available, so regular maintenance was part of the business plan. The CRT spends ~£50million a year to raise ~£180million  which is used to, like, keep water in the canals and repair gates that keep water in the locks. Whence the money? "More than half of our income now comes from property, investments, utilities, donations and other funding". The CRT CEO annual salary is £200,000; but 4,500 volunteers contribute ~100,000 work days a year.

There was a rather sweet comment to the collapsed in dramatic fashion YT video: 

@Roo-s_Slow_Living Oh my goodness, how awful. I live just a few miles away from where this is and if anyone needs temporary accommodation I have a little caravan with double bed and a heater and would be more than happy to help x

 

Wilf Rock

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 
Thus unlamented let me die; 
Steal from the world, and not a stone 
Tell where I lie.

When I was in Grad School in the early 1980s, I was trying to get a novel handle on the [Euro]peopling of New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I did A Lot of reading about pre-colonial demographics. I also put in a lot of field-work foot-miles from Cape Breton to Cape Cod in the East to New York and up the Hudson River valley to Montreal and the St Lawrence. Starting in to Year Three of this project my boss advised me to enroll in an evening course at the Harvard Extension School. It was something like "Grave markers and iconography in colonial New England cemeteries". As reg'lar readers may suspect, I have a low threshold for "gosh how interesting, do tell me more". I can't remember any details but if you plot "flying skulls" across time and space it looks like this fashion for memorializing the beloved dead in this way swept like a wave across  New England . . . only to be replaced by "sad angels", Our teacher projected A Lot of 50x50mm slides from a very large collection.

My abiding memory is of gravestones remembering several children from one family dying within days of each other. Also considerable discrepancy in age between husband and wife. And so many dead young mothers. Death omnipresent, a belief in a happy hereafter, but people still wanted [their names and dates] to be recorded forever in this vale of tears.

My Grandfather Wilfred [L, R] was born in in 1879 at The Big House in King's County as the youngest son. There was no future there, let alone a fortune, so he upstakes and joined the Army seeing service in the Second [Colenso, Spion Kop, Mafeking, Ladysmith, that one] Boer War and on the NW Frontier.  One story is that he got rather too deeply in a romantic entanglement in India, so resigned his commission and fled to America in the 00s of the 20thC: maybe winning a section of the Hollywood Hills in a card game; maybe being in San Francisco during or just after the 1906 earthquake; maybe losing all his money to become a panhandling hobo for a while. With more certainty, he volunteered for the RNVR in WWI and lost a lung while serving a balloon-observer in the North Sea. Later he was stationed in Egypt with the RNAS (Air Service) which, in 1918, was merged with the RFC to form the RAF Royal Air Force. I'm sure there were other people who served in all three divisions of the armed forces, but he's the only one who is related to Me. When peace broke out, he became Harbourmaster at Dunmore East, which is where his only son, my father grew up. The photo was apparently snapped in 1952, when Wilfred was about the age I am now. He's got a better hat, but I've got a better sofa!

Wilfred [was] retired in 1947 and lived out his remaining days across the water in Co Wexford. He died in 1957 and was buried [R] in St Mary's, the Church of Ireland First Fruits church where his cousin (and landlady) played the organ. I always found it peculiar that there should be a (Carlow white granite) cross at the grave-head because in practice he was agnostic edging atheist. But then again, your still living rellies have the final say w.r.t. grave-goods.

The Board of First Fruits was a cunning plan which, between 1778 and 1833 funnelled a lot of money into building "established" churches (and glebes to house the rectors) across the island of Ireland. 700 new and refurbished churches over 50 years had a significant impact on the landscape of vernacular architecture. At some level of consciousness we'll have twigged "Oh, another Protestant church on that hill, down than lane" there is no need to read the sign-board, if any, to recognise the Gestalt. St Mary's has the same look-and-feel as the church in Bunmahon which is now the Copper Coast Visitor's Centre. 

Wilfred lay there among the Protestants, quietly weathering topside and composting below. Thirty-something years later, we came back to Ireland in 1990 and I would drop in to say hello if I was passing. I reported to my father that the lettering at the foot of the cross was weathered almost to illegibility. In 1998, we asked the local monumental mason to "make it better". This stone-guy emptied a £15 bag of chippings onto the concrete slab and sent an invoice for £120. Which was a bit disheartening. Shortly after that my father died in his turn and grave-keeping slipped way way down on the list of priorities. That chippings episode turned out to be useful because my letter to the mason recorded the full text of the inscription while it was still, barely, legible.

Forward another ~25 years and there were more deaths in the family. Three of them were buried in Kill, Co Waterford and a rather spectacular, somewhat foreign looking, ✞ was commissioned to mark the spot. This was all the work of Thomas Glendon, a quite-famous mason and letterer, and last year I drove a shovel to facilitate some up date-ing. We all liked the cut of Tom's lettering: very elegant, the ligatures. Tom is even older than me, and with a sense of clock ticking, we asked Tom to re-cut Wilfred's 1957 inscription.  I lied about the inscription in 2o2o. It's not Stephenson's Home is the sailor, home from the sea And the hunter, home from the hill but rather Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas [as L and below] from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene which has the virtue of being a) shorter than RLS b) penned, possibly in Ireland, by a planter from the Other Island. Our planter family came over about 50 years later . . . and stayed.

As they do, and like Topsy, the project growed. From two lines scrunched at the base of a granite cross to 200kg of recumbent Kilkenny black limestone slightly battered to shed the rain, and filling about 20% of the space between the curbs of the grave. That took forever several months of to-fro, but on a bitter wet and wind-driven day at the end of January, Wilf's Rock was delivered to site [R] as we watched white horses scudding across Bannow Bay.

Book 1. CANTO IV, verse XL
He there does now enjoy eternall reft
And happy eafe, which thou doeft want and craue,
And further from it daily wandereft:
What if fome little payne the paffage haue
That makes fraile flefh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not fhort paine well borne, that bringes long eafe,
And layes the foule to fleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after ftormie feas,
Eafe after warre, death after life does greatly pleafe.

Title a rather weak reference to Wolf Rock which caused HMS NormalAccident in 2002. The more familiar, because nearer, Wolf Rock has a lighthouse. Waterwolf is another, floodier, thing altogether.