Sandwell Fantasy Land

Sandwell District Council, recently reported in the Sunday Times as last year being one of the 4 worst councils in the country, seems to be in a fantasy world of its own.

I recently published a photograph of a notice entitled 'Looking after your countryside' in which Sandwell extolled the virtues of chainsaws! Needless to say it is pursuing an active policy of chopping down trees, and this notice is presumably intended, somewhat bizzarely, to make its readers come to love the sound of metal on CO2 absorbing woodland.

And, of course, it is Sandwell that conceived the infantile £52+ million art gallery called 'The Public', which, apparently, contains very little art and almost no public!!

As if these don't provide sufficient evidence of a council which is detached from the rest of the world, try this for size.

Alongside Swan Pool, (a 30 something acre lake in Sandwell Valley), runs a tarmac path under which a tunnel has been made. The purpose of the tunnel, otherwise known as a run-off, is to regulate the height of the pool, by letting water overflow through the tunnel, when it reaches a certain level.

Sadly though, although the (£35,000 or £45,000, depending on who you talk to) run-off has been there since March, not one drop of water from the pool has yet passed through it.

'Why?' I hear you ask. 'Have we not had one of the wettest summers for years?'

It's true. Your observation is correct. We have indeed had rain this year and lashings of it.

So why then hasn't the pool overflowed through this tunnel?

The answer is very simple.

Just 200 hundred yards down the same path is another run-off, an old run-off, about 2/3rds the width of the new one. This old run-off, which as far as folk know, has always been there, is set at a lower level than the new one, and so water continues to flow out through it now, just as it has always done.

Put another way, the new run-off has been set at too high a level and, I am told, one of the chaps who was involved in making this run-off said that it would never work because it was too high!!

And I must say, to my untrained eye, he might have a point, because the pool surface is about 3 inches lower than the bottom of the tunnel. If my maths are correct you would need getting on for 4 million gallons of water just to get the pool height up to the bottom level of the new run-off, and, of course, while you are doing that, it's running out of the old run-off. Obviously there must be a point when water is going into the pool so fast that the old run-off can't take it all, and the pool level starts to rise up the necessary 3 inches to get to the new run-off. Unfortunately my maths isn't up to that calculation, but the required rate of input must be staggering.

So, you may think that the intellectual elite at Sandwell have done it again, only this time, instead of doing something irrepairably damaging to its woodlands, or wasting a small fortune on a non-art gallery, it has built something that has no possible use and is just plain stupid.

Well, you would be wrong.

The Sandwell intellectual elite know something that neither you, nor I, nor the chap who built the new run-off know.

They know, apparently, and I have this from a usually reliable source, that once every 100 years Swan Pool floods. Ho ho!

And when it does, Sandwell are ready for it!!

Bravo!!

It must be soon, because the pool has been there for over 100 years and nobody I have spoken to can remember it flooding yet.

Just one slight snag.

If I'm right about the millions or billions or zillions of gallons which need to go into the pool to get it to overflow, then Sandwell will have a bit more to bother about than a pool overflowing. There would have had to have been something like a biblical 40 days and 40 nights of rain, like in Noah's day.

But don't for Heaven's sake tell Sandwell that, or else this time next year, you could well find a fleet of elf and safety approved arks parked up and down West Bromwich High Street.