Ronaldo47

Here's an extract from the textbook [☆] from which I got my information about factors affecting landslips. It seems that there are many possible explanations, and that site surveys and soil analysis are usually required to establish the reasons with any degree of certainty. Removal of overburden as a cause of failure in railway cuttings in clay is mentioned. Blaming it on climate change without having first made the soil tests and other investigations that such a landslip warrants, seems a bit presumptious! Catastrophe extracts.pdf [☆] "Catastrophe- the violent earth", Tony Waltham, Macmillan, first edition, 1978, ISBN 0-333-22595-3

I have heard of people whose car was legally parked and they were not in it when it was hit by another car, being penalised by their insurers. I wonder how those unfortunate people whose cars were written off by that fire in the airport multistorey car park last year got on?

I believe that it is a legal requirement to have third party insurance for motor vehicles. Certainly GEC (when it was a large company!) only used to take out third party insurance for its company cars as the cost of fully comp insurance would have exceeded the cost of repairing or writing-off damaged vehicles. The Government does the same sort of thing in relation to insurance in general, which is why the disastrous fire at Windsor Castle a couple of decades ago was not covered by any insurance. I adopt the same practice regarding breakdown insurance for domestic white goods, which are normally pretty reliable these days: I don't take any out.

When we first did the Llangollen, we hired a Friday-to-Friday boat and virtually had the canal to ourself for most of Saturday. But that was more than 20 years ago.

It's also possible that a factor is the original constructors' ignorance of the fact that previously-buried soils can progressively lose strength over decades due to aerial weathering causing chemical changes in their structure, something that only became known from experience. That has been identified as the cause of failure of numerous railway cuttings that were built in the Victorian era that have suffered this sort of slumping many decades after their construction. Increased rainfall making the ground wetter won't have helped, but I think we have had wet weather episodes well before climate change was on the agenda.

Christmas 1960. We had recently had to go over to smokeless fuels as we were in a smoke control area. The fire in the front room had been in for two days and was a bit tired. I had just been learning about steel making and coal gas production in chemistry lessons at school and remembered the bit about how air was blown into coke to heat it up. I got mum's cylinder vacuum cleaner, which blew as well as sucked as they all did then, and tried blowing air in through the front firebars (it was a drop front all-night burner fire). It soon got the fuel up to white heat, and when the ash was cleared out a day or so later, it was found that the cast iron firebars had got so hot that they had sagged.

When we used to burn coal and/or smokeless fuel on our open fire at home, the soot was always loose and powdery. For the past few years we have been burning hardwood logs that have been seasoned for at least two years, as we now have access to a free supply. The soot from burning wood is very different, forming hard porous clumps. I can see that wood burning might cause problems with the narrow flues used on narrowboats if not swept regularly, and that a stiffer brush would be needed when burning wood compared with coal or smokeless.

My understanding is that they would need to prove: a. That copyright still exists, and b. That they own it, by providing evidence in the form of an unbroken chain of written assignments of copyright, in the case of a pre-1911 photo, normally from the person who owned the camera film. While damages for copyright infringement is covered by civil law, my understanding is that demanding money that you know you are not entitled to, is an offence under criminal law, so they would need to be very sure of their facts before taking legal action. Of course, my understanding might well be incorrect.

A photograph taken in 1910 would have been covered by the Fine Arts Copyright Act of 1862, then by the Copyright Acts of 1911. 1956, and the present act of 1988. Transitional provisions apply to copyright subsisting at their commencement. For the present Act, if something was out of copyright on 1st August 1989, then it is not resurrected and the longer term of copyright afforded by the present Act dies not apply. N.B. A footnote in the standard work on UK Copyright (Copinger & Skone James, 1991 edition) in the section of ownership of copyright in photographs under the 1911 Act, states "The copyright in all pre-1911 photographs will by now have expired." Possibly this explains why the book discusses the pre-1911 situation for other artistic works, but does not address pre-1911 photographs other than in the footnote. The date of first publication of a previously unpublished work can also trigger copyright term, but this is not really the place to discuss this topic as Copyright law can be a bit of a minefield, especially where it has had to be amended to comply with subsequent EC directives which could have had the effect of resurrecting expired rights.

The original "Butler" sinks were made of hard wood to reduce the chance of accidentally chipping expensive china when washing up.

If the image dates from 1910, copyright could well have expired years ago. I have seen lots of examples of unsubstantiated assertions of copyright ownership from people, and even organisations such as museums, that seem to think they own the copyright in photographs or printed documents that they have in their collections simply because they own the copy. Unlike Patents, there is no specific criminal offence for claiming copyright that you do not possess or which no longer exists, and to establish, in legal proceedings, ownership of copyright in a work you did not create yourself, you would normally need to produce a chain of assignments in writing between the original creator or owner of the work to yourself, as transfer of ownership of copyright must be done in writing. At least, that was the law as I understood it when I retired more than a decade ago, and I am not aware of any significant changes since.

In spring 1976 I was one of a group of 14 who hired Black Prince's original fleet of two boats, Nelson and Rodney, from their original base at Cosgrove. Both were brand new Harborough Marine 60'-ers. One had two sea toilets, the other two Elsans plus a shovel for burying their contents if we found ourselves with no access to a sanitary station (which we did have to use in that year's restricted lock opening hours due to the drought). Gas fired central heating and decent showers. The only problem we had was when the knob that you had to press to open the oven door, came off. As the only one who had brought any tools, I was able to fix it, which involved taking the door off its hinges and removing its back panel to re-attach the knob. I don't remember the cost of hire. Each boat was presented with a hand-painted wooden plaque on our return. BP were still doing this the last time we used them, but using circular slate plaques.

When using a hole saw on thin metal, it is best to support the metal on a piece of scrap wood.

But which year?

I think it's sometimes not so much a question of taking decades to settle, but more of the fact that some types of quarried material, especially clays, might well be strong enough to support a slope when first used. However, changes in their chemical composition when exposed to the atmosphere and atmospheric weathering, make them progressively weaker, resulting in slumping.

I think it was mentioned above that the slip has moved further since the video was made and now blocks the tow path. In Italy, when it was found that the ground conditions were too longterm unstable for a cuttting for a new road, they built a cut & cover tunnel instead, constructing the tunnel walls in the cutting and then backfilling the earth.

"Toe weighting" is a term of the art in Civil Engineering to refer to the weighty material put at the foot (specifically, the toe as it is right at the very end) of an unstable slope with a view to prevent it slipping any further. This is from a book on natural disasters. It is an extract from a passage that describes the geology of Folkestone Warren and the steps that have been taken to prevent damage to the railway line that runs across it.

The clay in my part of Essex gradually decomposes and becomes weaker when exposed to the atmosphere. It was found that railway cuttings started to fail by slipping about a century after their construction. The problem was solved by constructing dutch drains down the sides of the cuttings to lower the water table, combined with toe weighting.

The "Green Maritime Plan" explicitly states that the targets are not mandatory: "8. These zero emission shipping ambitions are intended to provide aspirational goals for the sector, not mandatory targets. " See my earlier post of 17th Jan 2024.

It seems from the article that many of the electric boats are in fact hybrids. Reference is made to doing a day's cruising on "mainly" solar power, which according to posters on other threads, might be possible on a sunny day in mid-summer, but which is unrealistic for a narrowboat under typical English weather conditions .