No! Not The Coiled Metal Device
Neither yet the season. No, I refer to water that gushes from the ground, naturally, rather than as when a sewer collapses. The Old French word for 'spring' is 'Fontanel' which we will come to in just a minute.
Firstly, Your Humble Scribe isn't going to apologise for having yet another dam-related article in the blog. Dams are intrinsically interesting, all the more and morbidly so when they fail, which happens a lot more often than you'd like to know. Let us now take a look at the South Canadian Fontenelle Dam (they just have to spell it differently!). Art!
Actually a great big spring
The dam had been completed in mid-1965 and filling the reservoir began in September once construction had finished, only for problems to begin almost immediately. Art!
A closer look
On September 3rd the head engineer in charge of construction noticed a leak near the spillway (the white structure at port above), which didn't slow and which washed away large amounts of the downstream shell, until by early evening it had created an immense gouge in the dam wall. Art!
Nothing to scale it here
Allow me to find more compelling pictures-
You can judge how enormous it is thanks to the diminutive status of the engineering plant on display, and the barely-discernible humans present. The trucks and bulldozers shovelled rock into the breach as far as it was safe to go, and more rock was dumped over the top end of the breach, along with material bulldozed from the dam wall. More crucially, the waters in the reservoir were released as fast as possible, causing a drop of 4 feet per day.
These measures were sufficient - just - to block the leak and prevent the breach from eroding upstream, which would have caused a partial collapse of the dam at that point, and the whole structure would have been destroyed. Art!
The road atop the dam collapsed into a sinkhole and you can see from this shot how thin the margin for error was.
The dam was subsequently repaired and renovated, for which see below, and has lived a blameless life ever since.
Gee golly, the exciting world of dam design and analysis!
The motley has come back in a full-body cast, so we're using it as a doorstop at the moment. And before you carp and cavil, we were going to use it as a doorstep, so consider this a step upwards, so to speak.
An Anniversary Of Sorts
Twitter, without being asked, has decided to blab to the world that Conrad joined it 10 years ago, the dirty curs. What if I wanted to remain in safely-unsued anonymity? Bringing up this kind of information only ever calls attention to oneself, when I can quite do without legal sanctions from various slandered entities. Art!
Perhaps I could pretend that it's "Io" instead, you know, the moon of Jupiter, full of volcanoes and sulphur yet very little water.
In terms of vulcanicity, in fact, Io is the most volcanic object in the Solar System; you might even say it goes to 11 on a Io scale*.
"Rude Mechanicals" By A.J. Smithers
Ha! Yes, yes, yes, I bet a lot of you skeptics out there were blathering over your gin muffins and fermented yak curd "O he's definitely lost it, whoever heard of a memoir with a title like that!" when I dragged it up from the depths of my memory earlier this week. Art!
"An account of tank maturity during the Second Unpleasantness" in case you don't have a magnifying glass to hand. Well, I might put it on the front burner because I've not found a reasonably-priced copy of that Royal Signals history and "The Founding Of Evil Hold School" only has 3 editions on Abebooks, the cheapest of which is £120 <sad face> whereas RM is only about £3 with free postage. Art!
<Utters longing sigh>
James Deals With Claims
For Lo! we are back on arcane and obscure medieval legal terminology as cribbed from the pages of "Sir Nigel" and the next weird word is "HERIOT" and yes I know the author has two "R"s which is just him being greedy, especially since it's a pseudonym anyway.
ANYWAY it derives from Anglo-Saxon and 'heregeatwa' which is composed of 'here' for 'army' and 'geatwa' for 'equipment'; when a serf or villein died then a portion of his military gear went to his feudal master. This later evolved so that the lord and master got matey's best cattle or property, because that's how they stayed lord and master. One thing I have noticed about all these legal terms; they all benefit the church and aristocracy. Art!
George Heriot
He was a noted philanthropist, and Ha! you were expecting James, weren't you?
"INFANG/OUTFANG": These are somewhat trickier, since 'outfang' has several definitions. Both seem, however, refer to the right of a manorial lord to try a thief captured on his lands, specifically if they were one of his serfs, servants or soldiers. He could even pursue them into other manors under other lord's jurisdiction to bring them back to justice. Or, execution, as they were one and the same thing. 'Outfang' has been taken to mean that the resident lord had the right to try any thief he caught on his lands, which implies there might be a bit of a clash with the thief's own lord in hot pursuit. Art!
"The peasants are revolting! The peasants are - O. They really are revolting."
I think that's enough legalese for one day. Don't worry, we still have more obscurantist jargon to juggle with**!
Finally -
I am only going to say that you couldn't make this up and if you did people would scoff and mock you. For I am well into reading of the British operations at Gallipoli where a surprise landing had been carried out in Suvla Bay that completely wrong-footed the Turkish defenders on the peninsula. It was top secret. So secret, in fact, that the commanding officers who landed had no idea where they were or what was going on. Art!
The aged idiot in charge was well named: General Stopford. When everything hung on making a rapid advance inland, he - stopped. For several days. Because 'It was hot and there was dirt and guns are noisy.***' Then there was the Brigadier whose orders were to advance quickly to capture hills and ridges whilst they were undefended. He did not. Instead he, too, stopped and sat down. He managed to do that well. His name? Brigadier Sitwell. Between Stop and Sit the whole landing was doomed from the start.
" An air of desperate urgency permeated the whole landing."
"Sunbathing in the Med"
* One louder, in fact.
** I bet you can hardly wait.
*** Only slightly exaggerated.
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