Essay by Eric Worrall
It wasn’t slipshod earthworks maintenance, it was climate change wot dunnit?
Newington landslip due to climate change, says Network Rail
By Jacob Panons
BBC News, South East
A railway director said the train system is “suffering the challenges of climate change” following a landslip in Kent.
Network Rail, which found a 40m (131ft) long crack, said material had slipped about 5m (16ft) down an embankment at Newington on Friday.
Network Rail’s Kent route infrastructure director Bob Coulson said more than £470m had been spent on earthworks.
The line is due to reopen on Monday.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-68435639
To be fair, Kent does get a lot of rainfall, including over the last few days. But getting historic rainfall data out of the British Environment Agency is like pulling teeth.
In addition, the area has long been known for landslips. Down the road in Folkestone, a recent landslip is threatening a residential house. And you don’t have to look hard to find historical accounts of other landslides in the region, such as a Kent landslide which caused a train crash in 2020, a severe landslide in 1988, or severe landslips in 1877, 1920 and 1939.
Clearly these evil CO2 molecules have developed the ability to tunnel backwards in time, and cause climate disasters before they were even released into the atmosphere.
Update (EW): Pakistan is investing in advanced remote monitoring systems to detect landslides before they happen, by measuring millimetre scale deformations of the ground. Perhaps Network Rail should send a scientific team to Pakistan, so their people can catch up to Pakistan’s scientific advances.
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An old English proverb: “February fill dyke.”
As we approach the 200th anniversary of the first main-line railway (Liverpool & Manchester) in the UK, we have to remember that the infrastructure across the network is therefore also approaching that age or is, at least, 150 years old. When, some years ago, embankments started collapsing down on the old Great Western main line in Wiltshire I asked a civil engineer friend whose speciality was soil mechanics why this was happening.
His reply was that, basically, we don’t have much experience of that sort of earthwork of that sort of age and are still on a bit of a learning curve regarding how they behave over time. So maybe not poor maintenance.
Show your friend this paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-34030-0
Pakistan is making a serious effort to anticipate potentially deadly land slips on highways by monitoring for small millimetre scale deformations which precede major landslides.
Network Rail should be doing the same.
Foolish thought. More wind turbines are needed. No money for such trivial pursuits.
Yep my bad.
From observation, Eric, I’d say that that is what NR is starting to do; I’ve noticed arrays of sensors on the sides of cuttings at an increasing number of places over the last few years.
But I doubt if they have the resources to instrument every bank along the thousands of miles of our railway network; I presume that they therefore give priority to locations either with a history of problems (e.g. Folkestone Warren) or those deemed to be a potential problem due to geological formation.
Small slips like the one you reported don’t fall into either category and are the result of localised weather conditions on ageing infrastructure, such as the unusually high rainfall we’ve had so far this year. Definitely not climate, though!
As the old joke has it: Britain doesn’t have a climate – just weather.
The first public railway, of course, was the Surrey Iron Railway, of 1803. They used horses to pull the wagons. And Southern Rail uses the same routes, which is – possibly – a reason that folks HATE commuting into London. I did, certainly.
Auto
The Surrey Iron Railway was, as you say, Auto, a horse-drawn tramway and followed roads for much of its length. It had more sharp bends than a proper railway could cope with, so very little of its route is replicated by today’s Southern Railway, I’m afraid.
“Suffering the challenges of climate change”
John Kerry just said we are facing ‘climate breakdown’.
And right on schedule National Rail gives us a nice visual of what Kerry meant.
Fixed in three days using 3000 tons of rock fill to provide a lesser slope angle.
Real climate change challenges:
What would a “broken-down climate” look like? Some areas dry, some wet, some warm, some cold, some lousy, some more pleasant than others?
A world just like this one, in other words?
No. constant lightning flashing from the sky. Lack of vegetable or animal life as far as the eye can see. The earth twisting and crumbling as great crevasse like openings splits open and close constantly.
These people are geniuses. Greta says we have to get CO2 down to as low as possible.
Oh but wait! It is okay for Greta and other climate hypocrites to use FF every day because they got the word out for the peasants to cut back on their FF use and now there is room for Greta to use FF because surely the little people know to stay in line. Right? 😉
Right out of Thomas Malthus’s playbook.
I really hate that use of the word “work”, dittos with “successful” because those words are ideological/political and “work” as meant by the propagandist is very different from those to whom the propaganda is targeted to manipulate.
To the climate propagandist, “work” and “success” means that they have profited mightily, it “works” because the goal was to implement communism and profit the sponsors, often showering them with money, power and sex with children.
“Bidenomics” “works” and is “successfull” because the Party has benefited in material and ideological ways. Krugman can say that it “works” and is “successful” while tens of millions of people suffer in a myriad of ways because the Party and their sponsors benefited, and that is all that matters.
BTW, I love your book “Arts of Truth” and have enjoyed “Blowing Smoke”.
Once the hobgoblin has been created it can be blamed for any and all calamities, which will always be “successfully” addressed, if not remedied, with taxpayer dollars. The REAL problem is that it is no longer a transfer of funds to those pulling the political strings but rather a transfer of obligation to pay for future generations.
Work for whom. Think of all the grant money success.
Indeed!
Certainly ‘works’ for promoters of breeze-power, and – in the UK! – Solar/slaver panels.
A reminder, all of the main island, Great Britain [the vast bulk of England, Scotland and Wales] is north of Winnipeg, Canada. So, too is Northern Ireland, by the way!
Auto
One of Kent’s more scenic features, the White Cliffs of Dover, were formed by climate change. The chalk was formed by millions of years of marine sediments composed of plankton debris, then uplifted by geologic movements, then exposed when the mile-thick glacier over Britain melted.
Rising sea levels sheared off the cliffs only an eye blink of geologic time ago, yet still thousands and thousands of years before John Kerry and Saint Greta could blame it on corporate greed or human wickedness.
Maybe the climatistas should cover up those cliffs just in case, so people can indulge the notion that people control everything, and ought to control more. We can’t use bulldozers to do the work, because that would require fossil fuels.
An added bonus — employing climatistas for all that pick-and-shovel work would create thousands of jobs.
I doubt most “climatistas” have ever, now or in the future, perform manual work.
The BBC article contains this final paragraph.
A Network Rail spokesperson had said: “Steps will effectively be cut into the slope before it is backfilled with 3,000 tonnes of stone, which will help reduce the gradient and strengthen the embankment.”
Which implies that the Victorian engineers who built the embankment (untouched since?) gave it sides that were too steep
Or the soil beneath the fill (embankment) wasn’t all that firm. Fills near the Great Salt Lake often need to be made with a core of plastic foam so the weight of the fill doesn’t cause the underlying soil to settle. If the fill was built over limestone, it’s possible that problem was caused a cavity in the limestone.
I would love to here what an experienced railroad CE has to say about this.
The natural angle of repose for granular material is 30 degrees. If the slope is steeper than that it needs to be restrained mechanically, as gravity will spend eternity trying to get it to 30 degrees. If the underlying material is weak, you need to cut down to the bottom of the slip plane, put in a bunch of big rocks to hold the slope in place, and then backfill with good material. Nothing new under the sun. Or, if you’re in Canada, pay more carbon tax to fix everything.
You have to remember, Ben, that these embankments were built to the standards of 150+ years ago, without the aid of computers to model the ideal parameters. More-recent experience might suggest that, ideally, the sides were indeed too steep – but they’ve lasted a long time before starting to give problems. I think you’re applying the wisdom of hindsight: the only perfect science!
I really doubt these are the same fills from original construction, to keep max speeds up railroads have to constantly maintain the ballasting the ties lay in. 150 years ago it was probably just dirt.
Karlomonte: you have to distinguish between the trackbed, on the one hand, and the sub-structure that lies beneath that, on the other. In the case of fills/embankments, the former would be maintained and updated over the years but the latter would be left well alone unless it showed signs of distress.
Climate Change: The now universal excuse for everything.
Including incompetence, naivety, and fraud, or so it seems in some areas.
Plus bleeding the public purse dry …
Auto
Mostly for incompetence, bad research skills, laziness, fraud, greed, pals are climate chumps too.
G’Day John,
“The now universal excuse for everything.”
Including Network Rail. (My comment and link are probably at the bottom by now.)
They’ve a way to go to beat….
“”The wrong kind of snow””…
The wrong type of snow” or “the wrong kind of snow” is a phrase coined by the British media in 1991 after severe weather caused disruption to many of British Rail‘s services. – Wiki
“It’s the wrong trousers!”
Leaves on the track
“Clearly these evil CO2 molecules have developed the ability to tunnel backwards in time, and cause climate disasters before they were even released into the atmosphere.”
I blame Doc Brown.
https://youtu.be/M0NgKiB_DZQ?t=27
It should be expected that climate change will be used to cover incompetence.
Not just incompetence….if your job is to be prepared for floods, droughts, or forest fires, blaming CC is a proven good way for competent but unsupported managers to
1) deflect criticism for your department’s lack of success away from it’s employees who probably worked very hard with inadequate manpower and equipment.
2) get more budget money allocated to your department for next year.
3) get the media siding with you instead of writing negative critiques (politicians do this all the time)
Add in ‘incompetence’ and now you have pretty well everyone wanting to blame CC for any extreme weather event…
Story tip – about CC economics/policy – Decades Later, Hayek’s Warning on Planning Echoes Louder than Ever › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
The global warmening has to melt causing soft slippery soil-
Snowbomb hits Britain: Arctic blast will brings -7C deep freeze as Met Office issues new weather warning for swathes of the country set to be hit (msn.com)
Much of “crisis climate” is caused by deliberate neglect of normal routine maintenance issues. The global warming can be trundled out as an excuse. Authorities don’t penalize this because it serves the official narrative, no one can sue for negligence.
A dam in Germany that was overtopped and breached by a massive storm that was forecast four days in advance (water could have been released and prevented the disaster and loss of life). No waterworks folk were fired and Merkel blamed global warming.
Same with wildfires in California and Australia where enviros won’t permit fire prevention measures and eco-warrior arsonists are even starting a fair number. Last summer’major Quebec fires an example. They caught a guy who had lit a dozen or more. UK had a massive flooding event because they had stopped routine dredging of channels that had been allowed to silt up. I call this orchestrating global warming, as I do fiddling data and shifting goalposts.
G’Day Gary,
“UK had a massive flooding event because they had stopped routine dredging of channels that had been allowed to silt up.”
That ‘stop dredging’ command came from the EU rules. If the government can scrape a few pounds together they’ll probably resume dredging, hopefully.
Climate change, the ever ready excuse for incompetence.
And the incontinent
Human error is a much likelier suspect when it comes to rail accidents caused by heavy downpours of which there are many every year in the UK. For recent example on 12.8.20 a train was derailed at Carmont in Aberdeenshire where three people tragically died.
The official report noted “However, the drainage system and associated earthworks had not been constructed in accordance with the original design and so were not able to safely accommodate the water flows that morning.”
Human error is also largely at fault in meteorology and climate science but resulting damages and/or fatalities seem unimportant if they are likely to hinder progress in the race to prove Mann, Gates, Gore, Biden, and motley others are not at fault or just common or garden propaganda machines.
Yes, Network Rail’s contractors failed to follow the plans and created a problem where none had existed before. For more detail see https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/RAIB_Carmont2020_v2highres.pdf
There was a landslip near me mid February which closed a rail line. Not expected to reopen until mid March. No mention of climate change though. Undoubdetly caused by all the rain we’ve had since June. So far they’ve shifted 2,500 tons if soil to help stabilise the embankment. Some people like to blame anything and everything on climate change. It just avoids having to take responsibility for anything bad that happens.
.
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It’s not necessarily evident that it was “cheap fill laid on an unstable soil environment” that caused this slope failure … or that the embankment was too old. There are quite a few conditions that can cause a slope failure. Such as poor drainage design; excessive loads on the embankment; earthwork upslope or downslope of the embankment; poor embankment fill material selection (the wrong material rather than necessarily cheaper material); etc etc.
Climate change could not be the cause of the failure. Coastal England is a wet humid climate with annual rainfall within a range of 30-45 inches, and that has not suddenly and catastrophically changed, no matter what the warmunists claim.
Stuff happens. Nothing – natural or human built – lasts forever under all conditions and circumstances. All infrastructure requires repair and occasional replacement from time to time.
I couldn’t agree with you more, Duane.
British railways are taking note of weather conditions and it’s effects on their operations. The link goes to a the current issue of “Rail Engineer”, a bi-monthly journal for railway professionals. (Upfront: they believe in “climate change”.)
https://www.railengineer.co.uk/responding-to-scotlands-weather/