Power cuts and mains water

[Jacob Jones]

Yeah, specially since the new water coming in overnight will be warmer.

[Andrew]

Sewage pumping stations are 'special users', like hospitals, so are the last places to be considered for an intentional power cut.

[charles]

But we were talking about fresh (drinking) water pumping stations

[williamwright]

A planned one yes. But a tree across the line?

Bill

[newshound]

If that was meant to be sarcasm, it's pretty stupid since even at domestic water main depth there's negligible diurnal variation. The incoming water will certainly be warmer if air temperature is around freezing.

During the 1980/81 freeze I lived in a Victorian terrace house and towards the end of the end of the freeze became the only house with water. But the mains were very shallow.

[Andrew]

If it was one that stopped homes being flooded with raw sewage I would imagine it has some form of batter-assisted telemetry system so that the water authority knows it has failed and gets a genny out there PDQ.

[Jacob Jones]

No it wasnt.

That's what I meant with a water tower which is out in the sir temp. The incoming water is normally coming out of the ground pipes and so is warmer and so less likely to freeze.

We were discussing big water towers.

[Tim Lamb]

The company I worked for in 1963 had a very profitable month manufacturing/selling low voltage transformers for defrosting pipes:-) Wouldn't work today with blue poly!

[Tim Lamb]

Hmm.. there is reckoned to be a 10 hour flood time on the one at the end of my garden. Big collector tank and level switching for the pump.

[Martin Brown]

In the case of the one nearest me during the extended Arewn power cut they were not at all happy and had to tanker stuff away pretty much 24/7 whilst the power was off. They didn't ever get a generator on site.

It didn't help that one of the major faults was immediately behind their sewage treatment plant. Willow tree had smashed through the 3 phase power lines which were in the beck and on the ground. There was another fault elsewhere on the same patch so even when they fixed that one they still didn't have power and neither did anyone else!

[Graeme]

In message <eRd* [e-mail]>, Theo <theom+ [e-mail]> writes

I posted about our adventures without power for four days last December, and one thing I didn't mention was water as we did not run out, and it didn't occur to me that we might. We kept on using water as normal, even showering while there was still hot water in the tank. We have a conventional cold water in the tank, and it must have kept refilling as surely we would have used a tank full over four days just flushing the WCs as normal, and I certainly didn't hear the tank suddenly refilling after power was restored.

I can only assume our local water supply is gravity rather than pumped.

Power was off long enough to kill the local mobile phone mast after 12 hours or so. Curiously, my battery powered radio continued to receive broadcasts during that 4 day cut, yet radio transmission was killed by both Dudley and Eunice last month.