The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-07-24 00:00:00

THE RAINFALL AND THE FLOODS.
Suggesting the necessity of providing against an unusna
rainfall and unexpected floods, The Times, in a leader,
writes :
- -

In bygone days, every now and then there was was a
cry that judgments were abroad. Prudent people,
however, even in those days, set about averting the
impending storm, having at least the sense to see
they deserved no special favour. There is now abroad
a plague of rain, floods, and even hail in some places,
amounting to the scale of a general calamity. First
we heard that a large portion of a populous city had
been deluged and destroyed, with hundreds of the
inhabitants; then that in the same neighbourhood,
and by the same swollen mountain torrents, villages
and small towns had been effaced from the earth,
with much loss of life and property. Again, tidings
arrived that the old capital of Hungary had been
well-nigh battered to pieces and buried under im-
mense hailstonee ; then that Geneva had suffered the
like, if not quite so much. Shortly the news came
that Lisieux, which is about as far from London as
the city of Exeter, had its turn. Still, the English
put great faith in the " silver streak." They think
it helps to keep off not only invasion and revolu-
tions, but even natural calamities. But we have now
heard that which should dispel this security. The
rains of last week, coming in the hay harvest and as
the corn crops are beginning to ripen, have probably
done an amount of damage exceeding, in the money
value, all the loss of property in the Continental
disasters. Many thousands of acres of hay have
lain drenched day after day, if not actually sub-
merged, or even washed away. Wheat and barley
have been laid as if by a roller, hitherto without the
power of recovery. It must tell in the yield, and still
more in the quality, particularly of the latter crop.
All the stock are condemned to tasteless, woody, un-
nourishing hay, on which the cattle willnot thrive,
and on which horses will become short-winded. Let
Parliament do its best to improve the breed of horses,
it will be beaten by fusty hay. But, as painters
.tell
the story of a universal deluge by an incident or a ?Inge
group, we have had that which will impress the visita-
tion on most minds more than any estimate of loss andi
injury to the brute partners of our ndustry or enioy-
ment. In South Wales there has been a rainfall which,
if instruments and figures are to be trusted, was quite
three times as great as that which in other places is
described as wholly unprecedented. It is only fair
to say this, because engineers seem to have some excuse
-for being baffled in their calculations when the enemy
comes with thrice his highest known force and volume.
Two portentous facts throw light on one another.
When rain descends in a tropical mass beyond all
former example, that accounts for a canal reservoir
bursting its bounds, to spread ruin and desolation;
and the calamity itself seems to corroborate the other-
wise incredible record of a rainfall amounting in a few
hours to the average of near a quarter of a year.
The warning, however, for such it is, knocking now
at our very doors and rousing us from a slumber of
security, comes on a people energetic enough in every-
day work, but somewhat unready at dealing with what
is novel. It is plain that we have much to provide
against, and better provision to make than we have
hitherto made. Under ordinary circumstances water
is our servant, and we ought not ever to let it be-
come our master—nay, not even in our hay and corn
fields, if we can help. We use it just as a master-
ful race is apt to use a servile race, at its own con-
venience, but forgetting that it may one day turn
on its oppressor. The variety of the uses, with the
general character of private convenience pervading
them all, prevents our ever thinking of the aggregate
force that may one day be brought against us. It is a
river, descending in fact, as in poetry, from the skies.
The surface of a vast basin, perlagto hundreds of miles
long and scores of miles wide, sloping towards us from
all sides, directs its fire, if one element may lend
a word to another, towards us. The rain which coveys
a country only an inch or two deep becomes a mountain
of water in a point of convergence, a sudden gorge, or
a narrow channel. But it is all calculable, and ought
to be calculated. If calculation be difficult, or
fallible, or dependent on uncertain facts there
comes in experience ; and there is no expe-
rience so definite and trustworthy as that of
periodic inundations. It is almost a certainty that
what has occurred before will occur again, and be even
exceeded, for the probability is that Nature, ever
teeming with fresh power, has not done either its best
or its worst. Whatever history tells of the Thames,
for example, that river is likely to repeat, even to
surpassing itself. Our chief danger arises from our
covering up nature, its history and its warnings, with
our own works, often done with an utter disregard of
the most obvious possibilities. Take a locality that
once was country, outside a town. We are not speak-
ing of Toulouse, but of not a few ordinary English
towns. Such was the conformation of the surface
that any unusual rainfall, called of course, a water-
spout, was sure to swell the stream into a torrent,
flood the low land and scour the outfall. Old inha-
bitants remember the area being first invaded by gar-
dens, and they may remember also a good length of
garden wall being thrown flat on the ground by a flood,
and the garden destroyed. But after the gardens there
came in due time streets, blocks of houses, and other
large and solid edifices, running perhaps quite across the
valley, and all planned on the supposition that a few
sewers would carry off all the water, at least with the
aid of shallow gutters. Now, in these cases it
generally happens that nothing whatever has
been done to counteract the original character
or the natural bed of an occasional or periodic inun-
dation, and a great deal has been done to aggravate
the danger, A mass of buildings in a valley will either
resist or yield to the water, increasing the flood in one
case and succumbing in the other. Whatever we have
done, the nature of the locality remains the sane as
regards its capacity for torrents and inundations.
There are several districts of the Metropolis where it
remains to be seen whether we have done enough to
neutralize the danger, and whetjier we have not in-
creased it. A time may come when we shall have to
do some very groat works over again.
It is needless, perhaps, to inquire, with regard to
this country, how far tillage, drainage, clearing, and
planting affect either the rainfall or the discharge of
rain-water, inasmuch as these operations will continue
to be carried on with a sole regard to the objects imme-
diately in view. But it is not too much to predict that
all the waterconrses in these islands, from the rivulet
to the Thames, Severn, and Trent, and their Irish and
Scotch compeers, will one day be placed under
public protection and control. There is no more reason
why we should leave water, or rather those that
exercise rights upon it, to take their own course,
than that we should extend the like liberty to rail-
ways, to shipping, to house-builders, or to persons
exercising dangerous trades—the manufacture or sale
of gunpowder, for example. Thus reservoirs, to a cer-
tain extent, are a security against sudden inundation,
acting as regulators; but the interest of the public
requires that no reservoir should be made without a
close and rigorous inspection of the dam, the work-
ing as well as the design. Then, certainly it is
something like tempting Providence to plant work-
rhops and houses occupied by people day and night
just under the wall of earth that may give way to
the pressure of water in a moment, without warning.
At Sheffield a few years ago a whole suburb was found
to have been built in the track of a certain destruction.
But, whatever has yet happened in this country in the
destruction of life or of property would be a mere trifle
compared with the results of such a flood as is any day
possible on the Surrey side of the Thames. A quarter
of a million people there live under high water mark,
and from Battersea to Deptford there are notoriously
many parts of the bank that would not prevent an
overflow should the river rise to recorded heights.
There fell last Wednesday in Monmouth and the
neighbourhood five inches and a half of water. With
a like deluge in the valley of the Thames, under
certain conditions of the tide, that river would cer-
tainly rise to a hitherto unknown height, and do mis-
chief beyond all imagination. People are not afraid
of the Thames, because the Water Companies, like
the ancient besiegers of cities, have divided its stream;
but we have yet to see what the Thames is capable
of even in its present apparently crippled condi-
tion. But, after all, we frankly confess it is not
the occasional danger from those vast masses of
river water which affects us most; it is the ever
continuing waste. In the last week this comftry
has received from the clouds, and passed on imme-
diately to the sea, the materials of cleanliness, health,
and wealth to millions upon millions. What costs
and what pains we bestow on the collection, raising,
and distribution of water! How we throw it away, as
if our worst foe, when it comes to us uninvited! Is it
impossible to devise plans that shell place under con-
trol the whole supply of these isles, so that we shall
never have too little of it or too much, and in the best
sense know both how to want and how to abound?

A new method of preserving wood from decay has
been recommended by Hatzfeld. It seems that, in 1830,
specimens of oak were dug up in Rouen, which had been
buried since the year 1150. This wood was quite sound, but
had acquired a black colour like ebony, and an astonishing
hardness. Hatzfeld ascribed its preservation to the joint
action of the tannin in the wood and the ()rides of iron in the
soil. Accordingly he now proposes to preserve wood
artificially by means of tannin and the pyrolignite of iron,
a combination which would in some measure bring about
the same changes noticed in the specimens from Rouen.
Hatzfeld impregnates the wood to be preserved, first with
tannin and subsequently with the pyrolignite solution. The
latter substance has long been used by itself as a preserva-
tion of the best character.