Yesterday, the 1st of August.
Lughnasadh, the beginning of the harvest season.
What will we harvest? Will we reap what we sow? I don’t mean to get all biblical on you.
In Manchester yesterday, some of the older buildings of Dantzic Street here are dwarfed by the omnipresent CIS tower. The blue skies obscured by menacing clouds. The transition point of old and new; the transition point of summer and autumn.
I had 19th Century ancestors that lived on Dantzic Street, though I’m not as knowledgeable about that particular branch to tell you about them. Yet.
I got home to learn about the drama unfolding twenty two miles away in Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire. Toddbrook Reservoir looms high above the town, much higher than that Manchester CIS tower. As torrential rain continued to fall, it was discovered that part of the dam wall was damaged. With a 50-50 chance of the water, all 300 million gallons of it, rushing down onto, into, over, the town below, the thousand residents were evacuated.
Whaley Bridge now sits as a ghost town, a ghost town waiting to be either swamped or saved. An unwanted cleansing of biblical proportions.
There I go again.
Today, this second day of August, the battle goes on. RAF helicopters, engineers, volunteers, all working together to try and hold back the tide, aided thankfully by a dry night.
We wait to discover the nature of this harvest.
Let’s hope they manage to get it fixed soon. It will surely not be the last potential disaster brought about by human stupidity. Fortunately there is still plenty of ingenuity and determination to secure the town’s future.
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That’s right-we’ve not even got to Autumn yet, with all of the storms that that brings,
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I hope that disaster doesn’t happen!
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The battle has entered its fifth day. But, a bit of fortune: a storm predicted for Sunday missed the town, so hopefully things are turning in their favour.
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We seem to be living in an age of flooding. While we all keep our fingers crossed that disaster will be averted, I can’t help thinking of all the communities in Britain and the world affected by flooding. Flood sirens went off again in Todmorden/Hebden Bridge. 25 years ago the Towyn floods in North Wales happened and affected a lot of my family. The climate’s gone mad, let’s hope they save the dam.
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A couple of years ago there were floods in nearby Rochdale, which I’d never heard of before. I think we’re going to see a lot of alternate issues from now on, mainly hill fires and floods. As I replied to Linda, above, it looks like the town has finally had some good luck.
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