THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

milasavesmoney wrote: »

Chalk streams...... Sneaking off to Google. (Love new things I'm unfamiliar with)

A swathe of the UK is on chalk (including me) which is fun as it's water-soluable.

As in, rain-water can penetrate, erode a hole or even a cavern and the first thing anyone knows about it, there is a sink hole. A leaking water main can achieve the same result. Someone known to me personally is out of their home atm, due to a sink hole opening under it. Gonna be an interesting insurance claim.

If you read Richard Doyle's novel 'Flood' one of the scenarios there involved chalk - shan't give any more spoilers, it's an edge-of-the-seat read and would give you a good idea of the vulnerabilities of the Thames Estuary, greater London and indeed the whole east coast of Scotland and England to a terrifying phenomenon called the North Sea Surge.

That's worth googling. I've spoken to a group of people who'd been living in an east coast town affected by the surge of 1953 and it was shocking.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953

Not quite Lytchett, armyknife, they're on top of one of the smaller hills! But not far away.

GQ, limestone's even worse for sinkholes - you can't help realising you're on chalk & it's fragile, but limestone is a solid rock that dissolves - scary! And where I come from originally, the predominately-granite area is quite literally undermined; it's rich in tin, silver & amethyst and people have been mining there since long before anyone thought to keep track of where the abandoned workings were...

Not long ago, we were in the Pyrenees and had a chance to visit a local gorge, where they've built a walkway through the limestone. It's an awesome experience, as you walk on a gantry just above stream-level, with literally hundreds of feet of limestone towering above you on both sides, carved into a series of caverns at different levels by this fairly little stream over the last 10,000 years. Which in geological time, is just a blink of the eye... the rock faces are netted off, but you walk underneath some giant boulders which have come crashing down and got stuck; one or two are resting on what looks like just an inch or so of rock on one side. Never mind the geology, I was wondering just what impelled people to go underneath these & find the route through in the first place...

I was talking to a prospective house purchaser about the mines in the chalk under this city the other week. As the planning dept can tell them, the search will throw up the chalk mines we know about, but most of them are unknown until they manifest as a significant problem such as the front wall or gable end falling off your house.Usually between one moment and another.

Convos with the public regarding potholes in the roads sometimes follow the lines of it's only about a foot across but it's about 3 feet deep and getting deeper every day and the hole goes sideways under the tarmac for several yards........ :eek:

If you don't cordon that off PDQ, you'll have a heavy vehicle collapse the carriageway and possibly get stuck in the road.

Highways inspectors and building surveyors have interesting lives in this borough. You can go spelunking under the city centre. Well, you can, I'm a claustrophobe and wouldn't do it on a bet.:rotfl:

Thank you WCS autoimmune diseases are just awful. They are (or were) rife amongst my mam and aunties. I've never been bothered before aside from a little vitiligo on my arm but now I have pernicious anaemia. I don't think about major emergency situations either but my mind likes to have a little back up plan and I think, like yourself, I should just stay calm.

For me I think it's about restoring levels quickly then keeping on top of things. It's just the meaning of the word pernicious frightens the life out of me (no pun intended)