General Chat

Just watched a borehole being opened to show how much water is being held by the ground in these flooded areas especially, and it gushed out. Those in the know say it will be months before the ground dries out.

Is there no way some of this water can be 'harvested' and stored in tankers or something for when we have drought conditions? Surely it would help to have somewhere to put the extra water to allow the ground to absorb more as it falls? I know it would be expensive but Cameron has said no limit to addressing the problems so why not hold on to this rainwater before it does more damage and it can be used later for fields in drier areas etc

Lizx

I think we all deserve a refund on our water bills!!!

What's the betting in the summer we will have an hosepipe ban?

The water can't be kept in Tankers as the powers that are in the know say it is all infected with slurry and what comes off the land.

So it would be no good for even cattle.

I agree there should be a way of diverting the water, I also think if drains were cleared and waterways dredged a lot of the flooding may not have happened, but then I'm no expert just a bill payer.

""The water can't be kept in Tankers as the powers that are in the know say it is all infected with slurry and what comes off the land.So it would be no good for even cattle..."""

Am I being stupid here but isn´t that what the water purifying plants are about :-0

Who passed on geography classes then ?

Under most of SE England there is a thick layer of sedimentary rock called an aquifier. ( clue: aqua latin = water ) Below the aquifer there is impermeable rock. As the aquifer is shaped like a giant saucer it acts as a huge underground resevoir supplying as much as half of the water in the south east. There is no need to try and store the "excess".

The water companies have small test boreholes down into the aquifer. The more water is held the higher the pressure. Currently it is at a record. In many areas the aquifer is full hence the overspill into more and more flooding. For extraction of water they have large boreholes.

The current flooding is not especially unusual in itself. What is incredibly stupid is the vast amount of every kind of mismanagement of land buildings and agriculture over the past 40 years in the passion to make money.

The floods in the Thames Valley could easily escalate from an inconvenience to an epic disaster for which the UK does not have the resources to cope.

Without the aquifier the current level of population in SE England would be utterly impossible.

"Fracking" for gas in south east england involves fracking the limestone rocks under the chalk aquifer. Some say this has no risk to the aquifer others do not agree. If the cracking goes ahead and the water in the aquifier becomes tainted then mission control will have a problem. Don't do that Dave.

DONT WORRY SIX MONTHS TILL THE DROUGHT,

SERIOUSLY
THAT BORE HOLE SHOWS THE GROUND IS COMPLETLY FLOODED
AND WILL TAKE TIME TO DRY OUT

My neighbour said he read in one of the papers that water charges was going up by 8% this year, if that's true words fail me

My geography classes were over 50 years ago so I definitely don't remember much about this subject, only where countries etc are positioned, Rollo.

I know round here the soil is on top of a layer of clay so it takes a long while for the water to disperse. 'They' want to build an estate of houses on the field at the end of the garden, even tho the water table is very high there and in our garden,and building will cause even more problems as there will be nowhere for the rainwater to go with housing, roads and driveways etc covering the land.

Fracking is just going to cause more problems I think.


Lizx

A tanker holds about 37,000 litres which is roughly the amount of rain you get if 1 cm of rain falls on a patch 60 metres by 60 metres.

Thus for a sixty kilometer square you would need a million tankers.

The pumping operation in Somerset is pumping water at the rate of three million tonnes per day, that is three billion litres, the capacity of about 80,000 tankers.

Linda , I don't know what area you live in but in the Anglia area the increases are roughly 1.7% (Anglian) and 2.4% (ESW).

On a tv programme last evening there was a Dutch woman speaking and she said they have holding tanks and store a lot of water. They are helping Britain in some places with piping to pump the water some distance away and other things that they are expert at in their own country where they reclaimed lots of wetland.

By tankers I meant storage tanks or something, using tankers to transfer the water to areas that often need it in other seasons for crops etc.

Lizx