The Sun.
London, England, 1864-12-27 00:00:00

The Late Inundations at Sheffield.

The cause of the giving way of the embAnktnent
of the Bradford reservoir, near Sheffield, by which
238 lives were lost, and £400,000 worth of property
destroyed, in March last, has been keenly speculated
upon by engineers. The Waterworks company
consulted several of the most eminent hydraulic and
other engineers of the day, and the report of those
gentlemen was issued to the shareholders on Friday
morning. The document is prefaced by a corres.
pondence with the Home-office, iu regard to the
resumption of work on the Agden reservoir, which
was stopped by the directors immediately after the
accident at Bradfield. It may be interesting to state
that Mr. Rawlinson (government inspector) stated
at the inquest that the substance of that I:ink was
as " porous as a sieve." He attributed the Tenure
of the Bradford bank to a fracture or dislocation of
the pipes, which are embedded in the solid earth
beneath the base of the: bank. In his reply to a
letter from the directors, after they had received the
report of the engineers, Sir George Grey says :
" I am to acquaint you, in reply, that as Sir George
Grey understands the works at Agden to be now
precisely in the same state as when they were ins
spected in March last by Mr. Rawlinson, and as
his report of the result of his inspection of these
works is in the possession of the directors, to-
gether with the report of Messrs. Rawlinson and
Beardmore on the bursting of the Bradford re•
servoir embankment, and a cJpy of the evidence
given at the inquest held at Shi,ffield, Sir George
Grey does not see what additional information
could be obtained by a further investigation
made at the instance of the Government. The
directors, with this information in their possession,
having now decided, as you infor Sir George Grey,
that they are justified in proceeding with the
Agden embankment, Sir George Grey can only re..
mind them that he has no power to interfere with
their decision ; and that if the works are proceeded
with it must be upon the undivided responsibility
of the company, and without any sanc,ion expressed
or implied on the part of her Majesty's Govern-
ment."

In their report to the shareholders the engineers
(Messrs Simpson, Hawksley, Bateman, Fowler, and
Harrison)'enter at some length into the circnm•
stances attending the construction of the Bradfield
reservoir, and conclude as follows :—" The filling of
the reservoir commenced in June, 1863, on the Occa-
sion of a heavy flood, and from that time, with some
intermissions, the reservoir gradually increased in
depth, and at the time of the accident, on the 11th
March, 1864, it had attained to a height which was
within three inches of the top of the weir. During
the whole of this period no imperfection of any
kind had bean perceived, the embankment and the
reservoir being absolutely watertight; tor although
a small spring of ochreous water issued from a shale
bed in the escarpment on the south side of the•
river below the bank, yet this t quaay appeared
whether the reservoir was full or empty, and was
therefore fed from other sources. Moreover, this
water still continues to issue, although the reservoir
has been emptied of its contents for many months.
There was no fracture of the pipes, nor any creep
of water along the outside of them. The embank-
ment was composed of materials which would not
have slipped if the base on which it rested had been
immovable. We must, therefore, look for causes
other than supposed imperfections in the quality of
the materials or workmanship for the failure of the
reservoir. The weather during the fortnight previ.
ous to the accident had been exceedingly wet, the
rain so swelling the rivers as to inundate all the low
country in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It is in
such seasons that masses of earth, commonly called
landslips, become saturated with water or lubricated
on their bases, and although at other periods com-
paratively or altogether stable, now begin to move.
That the ground outside the embankment has moved
is evident, not only from the tears and fractures
which are to be observed in the lower part of the
mass, but also from the significant fact that one cot-
tage situated high on the hill, and another nearer
to the foot, and both remote from the bank, give
unmistakable proofs of the recent movement of the
ground on which they stand. From the testimony
of the occupiers of these cottages this movement '
must have immediately preceded or been concurrent
with the burning of the reservoir. After a full
consideration of these and other collateral circum-
stances we are unanimously of opinion that the acci-
dent was occasioned by a landslip which occurred
in the ground immediately on the east side of the
embankment, and extended beneath a portion of its
outer slope, involving in its consequences the ruin
Id that portion of the bank and producing the catas-
trophe which followed. To this conclasion we
severally came on our first examination, and every
subsequent investigation, and the more intimate
acquaintance we have since acquired with all the
evidence and facts connected with the subject, have
only the more firmly convinced us that to no other
cause can the destruction of the reservoir be rightly
attributed. We are, moreover, of opinion that all
the arrangements made by your engineers were such
as might have been reasonably expected to have
proved sufficient for the purposes for which they
were intended, and that if the ground beneath the
hank hed not moved, this work would have been as
safe and as perfect as the other five or six large re-
servoirs of the company, which have been eon•
strutted in a similar manner, and which have so
long supplied the town of Sheffield and the rivers
Kivelin, Loxley, and Dan with water. With regard
to the propriety of repairing the broken embank-
ment, or of abandoning it and forming another
elsewhere, we are not in a condiiion to report fully
on this q iestion."