Water leak from main road onto my allotment!!!

[buzzingtalk]

3rd picture down is my plot - the only bit of mine you can see is the wishing well, a pile of straw/maure and some floating pallets

[muddled]

Okay...it looks bad.
And it's gutting when you feel you are making great progress and then, through no fault of your own....you suffer a major setback.
Total bummer. No question.

But;

I swear it is no exaggeration to say, most of my allotment site looked like your photos ALL winter.
Standing water, 1 to 3 feet deep, for weeks on end.
It's like it every year,
on London clay,

And produces glorious crops through the summer.

If it's pure water it will dry.
your manure pile will rot down as usual...you might have to add some browns but equally you may not need to....depends on the coming weather.

Thank the universe that it wasn't your house that flooded and sit back and wait....it's a setback I agree....but not a disaster. This will turn out okay. I'm sure of it.

[Mr Bones]

On the plus side think of all the slugs that are drowned. I can see why you're devastated and fully empathise, especially regarding your muck; meanwhile, is it possible to chop out any drainage channels before the next load of wet weather arrives.

[buzzingtalk]

The drainage is fine on my plot - it's clay but drains really, really well. There is so much water because it's a mains water leak, and has been pissing onto the site for 23 hours now, with the water board now saying it's unlikely to be fixed for another 48 hours. I'm going to have to wade in tomorrow with waterproofs on to rescue all of my small plants which are now completely submerged underwater. Don't think it needs any drainage channels, it just needs the water people to fix things and possibly pump some of the water out. Mine won't be too bad apart from my wood will have got soaked, plants drowned, shed will also be drenched and my soil is going to be hell for a while, but the person between me and the leak has had all of their raised beds ripped up, broken, glass broken from their greenhouse as well as a load of rubbish floating around on theirs from the pile of flytipped rubbish.

And I'd love to take comfort in the idea of slug deaths, but you know what, I've never seen a slug or snail on the plot at all! I needed a flood like this on my old plot though...there's too many pigeons in London Hopefully some sort of pest of vermin has been eradicated rather than anything beneficial or nice...

Spoke to the allotment officer and he's going to check it out tomorrow. I'll head back in the morning and see what's happened overnight - I went down a few hours ago and the leak was worse, but at least the water people had begun digging the hole and looking like they were working. My house does have some water now which is an improvement on earlier...

it's just frustrating as I'm out of work, I'm skint, so the only thing i can do to pass my time is work on the allotment. The weather has been naff for 2015 so far but the last 3-4 days have been perfect and I've been getting loads done. Working outdoors on my plot is a special kind of therapy to me which I really, really need this time of year and now I'm at a loss at what to do It's just crap to now have to leave the plot for however long whilst the weather is good, no doubt when it becomes workable again I'll be unwell again, it will be frozen/raining or maybe I'll even have a job which is good for my wallet but bad for anything else. Eughhhhhhhh

Will post some piccies up tomorrow, hopefully it will have improved, but at the very least the allotments officer will have been down and hopefully spoken to the water board to see what they are saying. Maybe they can pump some of the water away, or go and load my van up with manure and drag it all the way to my allotment seeing as my back is done in. But judging by the flow of the water earier, it's not going to be good.

On the plus side, the water board delivered a load of pallets of bottled water to my estate as a lot of us were without water. I took the 6 pallets the water was on, seeing as my 20+ strong pile of pallets is now drowning Silver linings and that Going to stack them up on top of each other on the plot/swimming pool to put my little plants on top of so they don't drown whilst the water is draining.

[alldigging]

Take care when you go on to the flooded land.

[buzzingtalk]

Went down just now - it's actually looking a bit better (the site). The plots behind me are draining well, and my mates is pretty much now just soggy with no standing water. Managed to get on to the plot next to mine without getting wet, mine is still a foot under water, and the 2 plots the other side (between where mine is and the leak is) are completely buggered. Looks like our 3 were the worst hit i can see all of my beds have been ripped up and some of the wood pile has floated about 10m away! So there will be lots of work to do, but not as much as the person behind mine.

Allotments officer has been down and said it's really unlucky that it happened here and the water just gushed onto the plots. He's now trying to find out what our rights are and if we will be able to get any support/compensation for damage.

Pic 1 is my plot from the back - was as close as i could get!
Pic 2 is my neighbour's plot, which is going to need some work fixing the raised beds!
Pic 3 is the start of my plot, which is pretty much 100% submerged in water bar some floating wood and a few plants
Pic 4 is what has drained - this was my mates plot who I took a picture of yesterday, and it's now pretty much entirely drained. So the water is moving!!
Pic 5 is the path that leads to my plot (lol!)

The leak is amost fixed, the worst of it is done but there's still a small leak going onto the plot, as well as the majority of it now going into the drains and onto the plot driveway which is fine. The two 2-3m holes they dug last night are now completely full of water, so I'm guessing they have a lot more work to do Still haven't got full water supply back at my house...this could go on for a while.

[muddled]

How much are you going to swear if they slap a hosepipe ban on you in April?

I really hope yours drains off soon...

[buzzingtalk]

We aren't allowed hosepipes anyway thankfully, and I live round the corner so if I had to, I could fill up water at home and drive it down to the plot. The irony would be quite amusing, however

There's a river about 15m away from the plot next to mine, so there's a water table not far under the site on my side - this is good in summer, and luckily the river is low at the min so the water table won't be super full...it's slowly draining at the back but we're on a slight slope so the water is just running down onto mine and my neighbor's plots, where it is slowly going down but it's going to take a good few days I should imagine. And that's provided there's no more rain!

I was hoping to get onsite today and fill up my water butt which is a bath whilst the water is still clear but it's going to be hard getting on there, plus it looks like the soil the waterbutt was on has moved a bit, I'd only dug it out the day before it flooded!

[Kristen]

I can see there are a number of annoyances - mulch floating off, and not being able to work the land at a time convenient to you, and so on but in terms of the longer term I very much doubt you will notice any effect at all.

A chum of mine has a lovely brook with banks alongside covered in spring bulbs - starting with early Snowdrops through to Daffodils. It was flooded a couple of years ago because council had not cleared a culvert and it got blocked. Council then said that due to H&S they couldn't work on it / had to dig up the whole road to put diversion pipes in / all sorts of excuses. The brook, banks and her garden were under water for nearly 3 months during early Winter before the problem was fixed and my friend assumed all the bulbs would have suffered through lack of oxygen and that she would face an uphill battle with compensation, replanting and then waiting some years for the bulbs to regain maturity of clumps etc ... in fact I and all her mates thought that too ...

In fact the bulbs came up right-as-rain in the spring, surprising us all.

Hence why I wouldn't be worried about the land being under water, particularly if only for a week or so.

[buzzingtalk]

The water is slowly but surely draining, which is such a relief. Although, it's beginning to show structural damage to raised beds, greenhouses and other stuff. Thankfully i'd only just started building stuff on mine, so it will be a matter of finding the wood (some i can see floating in the deepest bit by the bank!) and just dinging it back together. will need to level the soil again though. The plot next to mine is just broken though, all of their raised beds smashed, broken and moved, greenhouse windows at the bottom smashed, as well as lots of other damage. I think my shed will be a mess as it's a wooden base and I had saw, tools, and lots of untreated softwood waiting in there on the floor for spring so i could treat it. that will be warped now but apart from that, not too much damage on my plot. lots of rubbish floating around though so will have to go around collecting other peoples c**p.

I really feel for the 2 plots at the back though...theirs are completely ruined, the wood is unuseable I managed to get on 1 plot in front of mine, and his damage was minimal - i tidied his up for him as he's a busy chap, and he'll only need a few planks of wood to fix everything.

Let's hope no one had any chemicals or contaminants laying about!

Also the irony of 2 manure loads being delivered to the plot today, and i can't use them as i can;t get on my plot haha.

hopefully tomorrow 1 side should be drained, so i can get on and have a tidy up and move my plants onto some pallets.

[sparrow100]

Good luck with it - it sounds horrible. At least it's draining away. Fingers crossed the stuff in your shed is ok.

[Martin H]

What a mess. Glad to hear it's draining away.

When you next go down, take some WD40 and a rag so you can give your rescued tools a bit of tlc and stop any rust.

It could have been worse - at least the water main didn't wait until May before it burst!

[WendyC]

Just curious, where is this allotment? You have mentioned London clay and Thames Water but your location says Norwich. Do you commute to your plot ?

[buzzingtalk]

haha i need to update that. I used to live in Norwich but moved back to London after i split up with my partner. Been back here a short while and was lucky to get an allotment almost straight away due to being willing to take on a dump plot, plus i really needed somewhere to put my plants and stuff my mum and most of my mates live in flats so no gardens.

I miss my Norwich allotment, it had perfect loamy soil, hardly any pests, abundance of sun as it was south facing...it's going to take a white to get my London plot up to scratch!

[KevinM67]

I would get assurances from the water board that the flooding is just from mains water.

If the flooding has caused the drains to overflow - then there could be all sorts of contaminants in there.

Sorry to sound like the 'Prophet of Doom' but I had some bad experiences from flooding a few years back.