On Call

I am on 24 hour call at the moment.

So, hearing it raining all through the night, the first thing I did on getting up was to check the river gauges on Salford’s rivers.

This blip shows the position at the “Manchester Race Course “ (Castle Irwell) guage early morning. The river had risen fast. The last time I checked at 3.45 pm it had risen to 2.63m. So a steep rise, but it’s now stopped raining, so I doubt we’ll get too close to the 3.00m level, when flooding becomes a real risk.

Fluvial flooding that is. The other sort of inland flooding, surface water flooding, can occur without rivers and streams breaking their banks. One of my pet hates is people covering gardens with impermeable materials and even artificial plastic grass. Looks sterile and horrible, and cumulatively adds to the risk of surface water flooding.