The Wyoming Conspiracy

[hirez]

(JFGI)

Actually, I don't think the Cotswolds is/are a large military installation designed to control the population. I believe that facility lies further south.

However. When I were a wee lad, one of the oil companies (I believe Shell) ran a pipeline across Charlton Abbotts Estate. I think it runs over the top from the direction of Guiting Power, down past Spoonley and Waterhatch Farms, up the other side of the valley towards Goldwell and Middle Barn and exits C-A land at the bottom end of the West Down. I grew up seeing the patches of new fencing with a pipe-marker (grey plastic-coated pole per roadsigns with a red pitched roof) spread across the place, but never bothered to sit down with the relevant OS maps to mark down where they lay.

I don't recall anything like the fuss that happened when they put the gas pipe in the other year, which I am tolerably sure crosses the oil line somewhere on the brow of the hill above Roel Gate. If only because the silly buggers having a protest at the terrible scar wrought across the land hadn't actually been there when the last alleged terrible scar was created because they were a bunch of tiresome townie fucks. And since the previous terrible scar has vanished under the landscape and hasn't affected their house prices, the bastards don't give a monkey's.

At least I think it happened. The pipework that I'm fairly sure I remember isn't marked on the OS maps or the Googles. There are large scale maps of the UK pipeline network which sort-of-look as if something might run across the Cotswolds, but that's probably swamp gas, Venus or a training flight.

Comments

[arkady.livejournal.com]

You might be able to figure it out from Google Earth satellite images, unless they doctor them specifically to obscure such pipes. It does go down far enough in resolution that you should be able to pick out the pipe markers if they're still there.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

grey plastic-coated pole per roadsigns with a red pitched roof

So *that's* what those things are!

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

I think that pipeline's scar-status is fairly small beer compared to the whacking great water mains pipeline that went in between various bits of the North Cotswolds and the civilised outskirts of Ledbury over the past year-and-a-bit. The bits where it went under/over the M5 were particuarly entertaining (M5 J9 looks like it has been prepped for an extra slip-road on the Tewkesbury side; this is actually just the access road to sling the pipeline underneath). The idea is to prevent Mythe being a single point of failure.

Of course, a leaky oil/gas main is a different kettle of yellow safety jackets to a leaky water main, but the chomping up of the countryside to lay the bugger down is the issue under discussion here.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Linky-pics: http://bit.ly/eHtXuP

[maluse.livejournal.com]

If your water main's big enough then a leaky main can be quite a big deal!

You can trace the path of the Kempton Park to Cricklewood water main (1930s, 3 x 40-48" diameter pipes, 500-1000 L/s each IIRC from when I installed some monitoring equipment on them in 2009) on google maps. Start at the strange green pathway south west of the "A" here (http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Barrack+Road,+Hounslow,+London&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=17.654694,49.614258&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Barrack+Rd,+Hounslow,+Greater+London+TW4+6,+United+Kingdom&ll=51.464248,-0.390154&spn=0.004559,0.012113&t=h&z=17) and scroll around looking for scars through any green area.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite anectdote about last year's gas laying was the bit where they decided to go through, not over, Hailes hill.
According to local rumour, they pushed in to the rock with a huge and expensive drill bit, which quickly found a cave and dropped to its doom. (Caves? in Limestone? Whoda thunk it!? )And then, because they're dead clever, they did it again.

2 bits of 21st century alloy down in the rock at pre-cambrian level. That'll gigger up the future archeologists.

[aoakley.livejournal.com]

Some German lot (http://www.peri.com/ww/en/projects.cfm/fuseaction/diashow/reference_ID/1087/currentimage/2/referencecategory_ID/2.cfm) pitched up at the parental village in Salop about 10 years ago, to replace the crumbling 1930s concrete colliery bridge (onto which was gaffa-taped the power supply for 2,500 people; power cuts were a regular feature of my youth, and the 7 pubs serving the village were ranked by locals based on how many manual pumps they had).

Anyway, turns out the Jerries hadn't done much thinking-through. The reason the old bridge was fscked was that, when you put something fast-flowing like the River Severn, through sandstone, it tends to carve quite a deep gap, and the sandstone around it - the clue is the word "sand" in "sandstone" - tends to sheer off and wobble about. Then there's the other clue in the title "colliery bridge", clearly indicating the proximity of... a colliery.

So, they sink the foundation supports 10 metres deep.

At around 9.5 metres, the support column they're bashing into the hole, goes "WHUMP!" and disappears into a mine tunnel, followed by a few thousand litres of the River Severn and whichever bits of their piledriver weren't chained down.

To which the locals respond "Well, *duh*..."

Project takes another year to identify somewhere they can put 20-metre foundations.

The resulting bridge is now *curved* through the horizontal plane, taking an S-bend route from various points at which they actually managed to anchor the bugger down. The bit over the actual river is straight; the approach route, less so.