From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Even GB News have fallen for this load of climate baloney!
The dramatic collapse of a canal embankment in Shropshire has exposed the fragile condition of Britain’s ageing waterways.
Engineers are now warning tiny, often invisible cracks are increasingly responsible for sudden and catastrophic failures across the network.
The incident, which saw a section of the Shropshire Union Canal give way and drain into surrounding farmland, has been described by waterways specialists as a textbook example of how ageing infrastructure, compounded by extreme weather, can unravel with little warning.
Britain’s canal system, much of which dates back more than 250 years, was constructed using materials and techniques that were robust for their time but are increasingly vulnerable to modern stresses.
Prolonged droughts can cause clay embankments to shrink and crack, while subsequent heavy rainfall allows water to penetrate deep into the structure, washing away supporting material.
The Canal & River Trust, which manages around 2,000 miles of waterways in England and Wales, told The Sunday Times such incidents are becoming more likely as climate volatility increases.
Alternating periods of extreme heat and intense rainfall place unprecedented strain on historic earthworks that were never designed to cope with such fluctuations.
Full story here.
There is no evidence whatsoever that alternating periods of extreme heat and intense rainfall are becoming more common.
But inadvertently the Canal & River Trust give the game away:
Engineers say the challenge is exacerbated by the sheer scale of the network.
Thousands of embankments, locks and cuttings require constant inspection, yet many defects remain hidden until failure occurs.
While modern monitoring techniques can identify surface movement, internal erosion is notoriously difficult to detect.
Funding pressures have also sharpened concern.
The Trust faces a long-term reduction in government support, raising fears that preventative maintenance will increasingly give way to costly emergency repairs.
Experts argue that routine inspection and early intervention are far cheaper than rebuilding collapsed infrastructure but require sustained investment.
If you want more money from the government, what better excuse do you need than “climate change”!
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YouTube creators, with interests in canals and boating, have been drawing interest to the situation for months, and even years…the neglect, and lack of investment have undone decades of restoration and heritage-rescue…
This has been apparent for years, it’s not only canals but rivers as well. There’s no dredging of rivers, which would help prevent them bursting their banks as frequently as they do.
With regards to the canal in Salop, was the canal lining put under higher stresses than expected because of the very dry start to this year followed by a very wet last few weeks, which I suppose that depends on the underlying geology?
I must admit that I am surprised the Grand Union and the Trent-Mersey canals haven’t had similar problems given their respective lengths.
Good point about dredging.
Even fires can alter water flow – after a forest fire soil does not hold moisture well. (Perhaps depends on type of soil. Note some fire destroys shallow roots.)
Climate change is the useful blanket that can be thrown over any failure of officialdom.
Certainly. Instead of proper maintenance of the canals and other infrastructure, spend the money on environmentally devastating SV and WTG farms. That ought to solve everything. Right?
Is a /s needed here?
It’s got to the point whenever anybody blames climate change for anything, the default position is that they are lying. This saves time and effort.
Climate Change has become a mandatory ingredient to any negative story that is being published,
and especially to those negative stories that are direct result of destructive policies of the climate change pushers.
The perpetrators preemptively created a villain they can blame their crimes on.
The madness never stops
Net zero fanatic Ed Miliband plots £13bn solar panel plan for UK
Ministers reportedly believe the mass rollout of green power technology will see some homes effectively bill-free.https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2151584/ed-miliband-solar-panel-net-zero#
More money we don’t have.
To capture sunshine we don’t have….
Indeed
If I were to design a house that cannot use a heat pump or solar panels it would look like my house and be where my house is.
Like the majority of Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian and even 1930s developments – ie everything Mr Goering missed and was not rebuilt. There were, however, a lot of slum clearances in London during the 1960s – the new Council estates etc.
My house is 1906, Edwardian and there is no economical way of making this house to their specifications. It would be cheaper to knock it down and rebuild. That’s Labour economics for you – the forever debt train.
UK railways and canals have many embankments from the Victorian era, some 200+ years old. Workmen made a pile of soil and hoped it would hold. Animals have been burrowing away and generations of trees and their roots have grown and died on them in that time. Most have had no more maintenance than an occasional inspection. In this case you can add in years of the farmer below the embankment ploughing the field, soil loss lowering the abutting ground level, meaning the embankment slope angle gradually became too steep to support the sideways pressure. And it’s not a sink hole, the bed of the canal has washed out from the flow of the escaping water.
Climate change top of the blame list? Lazy liars.
Climate change top of the blame list?
Yes, and every time. #94 The National Trust. In listed order…
Our cause
We’re Europe’s biggest conservation charity and we look after nature, beauty and history
About us
Zzzzzzz
Nature and climate
Reducing carbon emissions, planting trees and protecting wildlife habitats: just some of the things we’re doing to protect nature and the climate. – The National Trust
This is NOT The National Trust; it’s the Canal and River Trust (formerly the nationalised British Waterways) which the government turned into a charity when they dumped it on the private sector. It’s been chronically underfunded ever since.
The trust has responsibility for a considerable amount of 250+ years old infrastructure and very little money to keep it in shape. Events such as this are therefore, sadly, not uncommon – though this is on a bigger scale than usual. Last big one was this:-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-derbyshire-49196445?post=asset:f2e6cf50-1d9b-4652-98cc-5040f2eacb95
So this particular construction only lasted 250 years? What do we make today that would last that long? I would be proud of such a record!
That’s an embankment failure – nothing like a sinkhole.
Just another example of the press using a factually incorrect statement because it sounds sexier.
Sexier? Perhaps. Alarmist? Definitely.
Another factor is that canal water levels need constant watchfulness. I doubt there are people on the ground full-time anymore, monitoring flows and levels, and opening and shutting sluice gates etc.
If a canal starts to overflow above an embankment, it will rapidly wash out.
Another example.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/year-after-dramatic-collapse-bridgewater-33096374
Water bailiffs still exist though their duties may no longer include managing sluice gates and water meadows to control flooding. I’d be curious to know for sure. Certainly no one round my way does any of that any longer, and we do get significant flooding every decade or two.
What about the occasional dredging?
Much of our ancient infrastructure was built according to custom and established practice. Not very much of it was ever “designed” in a modern civil-engineering sense. If there is any surprise, it is that such structures survived till now.
I wonder if there is a convenient record of past failures? I bet there were a lot. It is wrong to automatically assume the latest failure is unusual.
Customer: My engine broke and I want a new one under warranty.
Service Manager: There’s no oil in the crankcase. When was the last time you checked your oil level.?
Customer: Oil level? Crankcase?
I check my turn signal fluid every six months.
The system is operated for primarily recreational use, and had fallen into disrepair for decades until volunteers got the CRT established, funded, and running. It is a trust, in part supported by user fees and dues. It doesn’t take a keen observer to see numerous cases of obvious maintenance issues in the YouTube videos posted by canal boat hobbyists – not “invisible cracks,” but overwhelming number of small issues and incidents that are lost in the noise until they become big enough to fix.
Some of the YouTube video makers were affected by this specific breach. They’ve been saying that this is the fourth on the network in the last several years. The best way to bet is that major system breakdowns will occur without an immense and continuing investment. With the state of the UK government such attention and investment is extremely unlikely.
In the UK, all infrastructure is in a gradual, sometimes not so gradual, state of decay and collapse.
So they spend billions on solar and wind industrial estate.
How much longer can the UK exist as a viable country… I suspect, not much longer.
Climate change??? This is clearly the fault of Brexit.
Just to show us how wrong they think we were…
George Clooney and his family have taken French citizenship
The real change in climate is Biden to Trump.
Let me see if I got this straight. A leak in the canal bed into the river running beside the canal was caused by “climate” and not a tree root breach from one of the many trees between the two. Is that their story? Really?
Don’t forget the critters that dig into the banks.
Here in Ohio muskrats with the occasional beaver are the usual suspects.
True, no longer allowed to hunt or trap so their populations are, like deer in UK, exploding.
Oh noes! The children aren’t going to know what canals are. Think of the children!
“Think of the children”
What, like many priests do; you can be arrested for that !!!
Not in England, as long as you are a member of the privileged demographic.
“compounded by extreme weather”
Extreme weather occurs regardless of “climate change.”
But we all know today climate is just another word for weather.
Watched a series on traveling the canals in Great Britain via long boat. A husband and wife actors hosted it, They did talk about many of the locks getting new needed mechanisms. A canal breaking and flowing into a river is bad, but several of those canals were elevated aqueducts over cities. Hopefully none of those fail.
Modern “journalism” has shifted from pure reporting to reporting + explaining “why”. When obvious reasons are not available, they they fall back on models or “may”, “might” or “can possibly” reasons.
If explaining reasons is required, the writer MUST find something, how however speculative. That’s what’s happening here. There has been no research to determine any extraordinary culprit, so the bogie man of “Climate Change” has been evoked.
You see this situation everywhere these days. Even Charlie Kirk’s assassination: within seconds reporters were issuing “reasons”, without even knowing who killed him!
This is a structural, endemic problem. It needs to be called out and stopped by the media bosses.
400 years ago, it would have been “witches”.
Today, it’s “climate change”.
Progress!
Well, the good citizens got rid of the witches and the weather improved.
Now the good citizens are working to get rid of Carbon Dioxide and expecting a similar result.
Can someone explain what “modern stresses” are? 🤨
The pleats in modern dresses?
Part of the failures for the canal breaches in 2025 appear to be culverts running beneath the elevated embankments. The culverts are for creeks or irrigation water. For the latest one, YouTubers have shown that the steel wall linings at the breach site were fairly recently (as in a decade or so) replaced while steel lining farther away from the lift bridge is full of rust holes and dirt washing away behind.
The one that happened Jan 1, 2025 was caused in large part due to not having an overflow spillway down to the river next to the canal. The washout and collapse mainly blew out on the side opposite the river. There was also a culvert under the site. I suspect the water overflowed mostly on the side away from the river, washing away the embankment. That large amount of water also eroded and blew out the culvert. Once a critical amount of support was gone, the collapse was rapid, so quick that the water flowing out sucked the steel sides into the center.
Josh, of Taylors Aboard a Narrowboat, documented that breach, starting live as it was happening when he was awakened by his families boat listing. He was able to loosen the mooring ropes and push the boat away from the side so when it grounded it wasn’t tipped much.
Since commercial cargo traffic was almost completely off the canals by 1965, with the final loads carried circa 1971, the network has fallen into disrepair. It’s going to take some BIG money investors to refurbish all of it, including restoring to use some channels that still exist but have been closed for a long time.
Another major issue with the canals is leaking lock doors. Large parts of the network suffered from not enough water this summer. They of course blamed a drought. Nevermind it raining so often in many canaler YouTuber videos. The problem is mainly all the leaking lock doors, some so bad they’re difficult for boats going up because water leaks out the low side almost as fast as it can fill from the high side.
If I were doing the project, I’d widen as much as possible to handle widebeam boats. Locks would also get lengthened where possible. This would entail widening a lot of historic brick bridges. Could do what was done with moving London Bridge to Lake Havasu. Build a concrete core and cover it with original stone or brick from the bridges. Same thing with the canal walls and locks. Build new concrete ones and cover them with the old bricks and stones. All the lock doors I’d replace with stainless steel with abrasion and UV resistant flexible polymer seals. Tradition be damned for that. Wear and damage resistance and holding water would be the primary needs.
“It’s going to take some BIG money investors to refurbish all of it”
Thats the problem !!
My first question would be what are the canals used for? I’m sure 250 years ago there a need for these canals, do we still need them? The canals should be audited, if a canal doesn’t make fiscal sense or fill a need it should be abandoned and perhaps made into a bikeway or some such thing. The canals deemed necessary should be upgraded immediately starting with the ones that would create the most problem if it failed.
Unusually severe weather does occur occasionally, could be hundreds of years between events.
Meteorology researcher Cliff Mass of University of Washington has explained that for the hot June and drenching November of 2021 in the BC-WA region.
I describe it as factors stacking up instead of offsetting.
Maintenance is key, for example:
Abbotsford BC failed to maintain dikes properly despite a warning from a river 20 years before even worse river levels washed out sections of dikesCalgary AB did not keep up on risk of water mains made of wire-wound concrete, major failures last year and this week. (Risk was known from other locations, and vintage of pipes.)I suggest vegetation can change, for example:
some tends to supplant others, in my area naturally cycles through alder, Garry Oak, and Douglas Fir.humans deliberately change vegetation, farmers of course with tilling methods and crop choices, tribal people here prolonged Garry Oak by creating meadows where more food plants grew (and maintaining those meadows with periodic fire to suppress Douglas Fir and insects).
Tilling by farmers changed from hacking at the dirt through intensive with machinery to less intensive that keeps dead vegetation in the soil to reduce erosion by water and wind.
Type of tree may be changed, for taste or disease – for example chestnut blight invaded North America from Asia, I don’t know about Europe but where still viable more would be grown for export to NA. Root pattern varies would hypothetically could affect water flow in the ground.
Droughts can occur spanning several years or even decades, but these canals are older than that. Varies with area, SoCal has had very long droughts on occasion but it is inherently dry to start with.
Noting some of the canals have brick walls, I say brick can deteriorate.
A chimney in house near me started noticeably deteriorating half a century after construction – some bricks were crumbling, whereas an older chimney did not.