SUGGESTED WATER "GRID"

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 145, 16 December 1933, Page 9

SUGGESTED WATER "GRID"

The serious situation in England caused by the shortage of water following on a record dry summer lends interest to a proposal by Mr. Alan Chorlton, M.P., in his presidential address to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on October 27, referring to the bulk supply of water and gag over large areas. On the question of water supply, he said:— "It is suggested that a scheme should be worked out whereby areas with heavy rainfall, like those of the hills, will provide, by suitable trunk mains, the supply to those parts of the country where it is or will be required. The 'wet spot' of England is the Lake District, where the annual rainfall in some parts exceeds 100 inches. It may be thought that this is at much too great a distance to consider as a possibility, but this is not really so. Los Angeles, for instance, takes 280,000,000 gallons per day (about the present total of thoMetropolitan Water Board) from a distance of 223 miles, whilst Glasgow, in Loch Katrine, has a supply of 75,000,000 gallons, but only from a distance of 23J miles;'. Birmingham takes a similar, quantity from a. source 73 miles distant in the centre of Wales. "The Haweswater scheme could be used as a nucleus for a supply from the Lake District. From this area much, could be drawn. It might be conveyed from that district by a trunk main to tho lower plain of Yorkshire, meeting a west-to-east cross-connecting main. The main would then continue through the dry areas of Lincolnshire to Cambridgeshire, where it would eventually meet the network of an enlarged Metropolitan area. Offshoots would go to the dry area of Norfolk on on© side, and across middle England to Birmingham and the supply area of Wales on the other. This would allow redundant water from the north to reach London, and at the same time would afford a supply to the dry areas between. An» other main would lead to the southwest. "It is an imperative need that the whole of the available water supplies of the country should be investigated and-a scheme, of which the foregoing is but a suggestion, developed by which they can be more evenly distributed, and the manner of control might; be by an authority similar to that administering the electricity scheme."