Those were the days.....

How will the coastline of Somerset look in twenty-five, fifty or indeed one hundred years time?  The county is vulnerable to coastal flooding, with a great tract of the Somerset Levels protected by a narrow range of sand dunes at Berrow and Brean.  The combination of a high spring tide and a low pressure system coming in from the west could raise the tide by another half metre and then the dunes would be under severe pressure. Researching for a film about coastal change in Somerset, I studied the dunes with a county councillor who showed me how the dunes have grown in the past fifty years and where the weak points are.  New sand dunes have appeared held together by buckthorn, shrubs and marram grass. Behind them lies a vast city of static caravans, the main west coast railway line, the M5 and the Somerset Levels. Driving back we got talking about his work as a county councillor.  ‘When I was elected I was told that Councillors got very little thanks for the work they did’ And then he laughed ‘But they said I’d be guaranteed a really good funeral’. Having once stood for our local town council in Glastonbury I know how much energy it takes just to stand for election, let alone serve at a county level, so I sincerely thanked him as he got out of the car!

ker clunk - ker clunk - ker clunk

On the road outside our home is a badly seated manhole cover that has, over the last few months, been getting steadily noisier.  Every vehicle that drives over it creates a distinctive ‘ker-clunk ‘ noise, that can be heard up to 100 yards away.   Typing ‘reporting road defect Somerset’ into Google brought up the startlingly appropriate  Somerset County Council ‘Highways Defect report form’.  Within hours of reporting I received a response from a Customer Adviser (Somerset Direct) logging my complaint (ref 214878) saying that it had been forwarded to the Assistant Area Highway Manager (Environment Directorate – Highways Group).  The Environment Directorate told me my complaint  had been forwarded, with some urgency, to the New Roads and Streetworks Section (County Hall). The Streetworks section told me they were forwarding it to ‘the statutory undertakers‘. Half expecting a hearse to drive up and check the fault, I discovered my report had, in fact, been forwarded to the utilities suppliers.

On Tuesday an Electricity Supply van arrived.  A man got out and peered closely at the manhole cover, shook his head and said ‘Nothing to do with the Electricity Supply’.  Later that day a BT van turned up.  An engineer got out, looked very closely at the manhole cover, shook his head slowly and made that whistling noise that builders make when offer you an estimate that is ten times more than you expected. ‘ Nothing to do with BT and even if it was it would take three weeks to get permission from Highways to do any work on it ‘.  Today, two Somerset County Council Highways vans turned up with orange flashing lights and parked either side of it. The drivers got out of their vehicles and studied the manhole cover very carefully from a number of angles.  I went out to ask them about progress but before I got to them they had driven off.  That leaves us with the water and gas suppliers to pay a visit.  I am not holding my breath.  It is all very well having a friendly interactive website, backed-up with prompt customer responses and email forwarding, but at the end of the day someone still needs to use a pick-axe and a shovel.

For the technically minded Michael Kravitz, a Forensic Civil Engineer, created a mathematical formula: ωf2xr2=ωo2xr2+2xαxrxh  to explain that when the Kinetic Energy (cars driving over it) exceeds the Potential Energy of the manhole cover, the cover will jump/slide out of its casting.  Let’s hope his professional talents are not needed and someone turns up with a set of traffic lights soon.