A Grave Watery

No!  I Have Not Mis-Quoted

Bite your tongues, as if I ever get anything wrong.  You were thinking of what happens when a submarine goes down with all hands, or after the merchant vessel runs aground and gets battered apart on the rocks: "A watery Grave", hmmm?

     Well, no.  I mean a matter involving H2O, which I have cautioned you about before, and is nothing to take lightly when it's present in large amounts.  "Large" in the millions of tons, Vulnavia, none of your puny broken mains pipe.

     For Lo! we are on about dams collapsing again, because it's a dramatic subject and you might be getting complacent about living beneath one.  Art?

Edenville before.  Very much 'before'.

     Back in May of this year, this dam suffered a catastrophic failure that led to millions of tons in the lake behind it flooding the area, and also causing another dam downstream to fail as well, causing in the South Canadian state of Michigan to suffer extensive flooding.  The Edenville Dam had been built almost a century ago, as an earthen embankment dam for water control and energy generation purposes, and the Sanford Dam had been built only a year later.  So they weren't in the best of repair, although Sanford had been rated better than Edenville.  Art?

Sanford after.

     The Edenville collapse was actually filmed as it started, rather remarkably, as these things tend to be over and done before anyone gets a chance to turn up and start filming, especially as sane and sensible people tend to run away from such disasters.  Art?

     Here you can see the embankment starting to give way as the soil 'slumps'.  Even a much smaller flaw than this would have caused a progressive collapse, thanks to the mass of water behind the dam and the pressure it exerted.

     Here you see a sizeable slice of the embankment has given way and the water behind in Lake Wixom is starting to erupt.  Again, once the breach has been made it will only get bigger as the racing water erodes the sides away, allowing even more water to flood through.  Art?

     Some brave - or foolish! - soul got close to the breach at the dam's eastern side and filmed this, getting a whole lot closer than Your Humble And Cowardly Scribe would dare to.  This is still relatively early in the breach, as you can see the water level in Lake Wixom has barely fallen yet; you can tell when flooding has ended because the water level on both sides of the breach will have reached the same level, or in other words the water level of the original river before it was dammed.
     Fortunately, and somewhat unbelievably, nobody was harmed in this flooding.  Of course - obviously! - because this is South Canada, lawsuits are being flung around like paper planes.  Art?

     The blue is normal water presence, the red is floodwater.  The good folks of Michigan must be wondering what next?  First Covid-19, then flooding and they say bad news occurs in threes ... *

The Very Definition Of "Hangdog"

Conrad is being a dogsitter today and for part of tomorrow, since the rest of the household have hauled anchors (practically literally) and headed for Whitley Bay and an overnight sojourn there.  This casts Edna upon my tender mercies.  Art?

     She's very good at this downbeat, despondent demeanour.  DON'T BE TAKEN IN!     Even now she's adorning the sofa, rejecting a perfectly serviceable dog bed next to the radiator.  Art?

I Hanker For Tanker

In fact only "TANK", though you can't 'hank' for a tank, as that would be a piece of rope.  For Lo! We are back to The Chieftain's address on Italian armour of the early desert war in North Africa during the Second Unpleasantness.  This is an interesting period entirely devoid of the mobile metal monsters found on the Eastern Front or in North West Europe after D Day; no, the tanks in the desert to begin with were various pre-war designs, undergoing trial by combat for the first time.  This always brings out any flaws there might be.  Art?

The M11/39

     As soon as I saw the soldier in British battledress and helmet, Conrad immediately realised these were captured Italian tanks, and then I read the caption at lower starboard.

     These tanks have come in for a good deal of unwarranted criticism.  As TC pointed out, their title "M11/39" meant they weighed 11 tons and came into service in 1939.  At that date they were better armed than the Teuton's Panzer Mk. III, which only had a short 37 m.m. gun, as opposed to the M11/39's more impressively lengthy model.  The weren't anything special in 1939, yet nor were they utter rubbish either by contemporary standards.

     I shall leave us there tonight.  More tomorrow**!

  

And now after the grim and the grey - and Edna, whom we can safely describe as "Grizzled", let us get gayer!

Bendis Recommends

Well, Brian recommends, and Conrad goes into more detail than BMB provides, for which you ought to be grateful, you uncommunicative ingrates.  How else will you know what comic book to purchase over the internet?  Today's entry is "Mind MGMT" by Matt Kindt, whom I've never heard of***.  Art?

     Hmmmm.   According to BMB, it's about an airliner that lands with every passenger having lost their memory, and an investigative journo who tries to follow the story and find out what happened and why.  Well, to Your Humble Scribe the artwork seems rather sketchy.  Let us canvass some other opinions ...  well, Goodreads feedback seems to admit the artwork isn't stellar but the plotting is intriguing and involving.  Hmmmm.  Conrad not in a hurry to get this one.

<wallet squeaks in relief>

Finally -

Ooops! I'm using my Fitbit to time some breaded cod I put in the oven a while ago.  I looked at it a good 10 minutes ago, and it said "13:27".  I looked at it just now and it says - 

     "13:27".  Obviously I've hit the Pause button and it stopped whenever it stopped.  The house is not pervaded by the reek of scorched fish, so I'd better stop typing and go take it out of the oven, hadn't I?

And with that, we are most surely done!

*  AVOID POLITICAL JOKE AVOID POLITICAL JOKE

**  I know you can hardly wait, you thirsters after knowledge.

***  Mind you, there are billions of people I've never heard of.