WONDERS OF A RAINY DAY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18431, 15 March 1922, Page 7

WONDERS OF A RAINY DAY

STAGGERING STATISTICS ABOUT A LIGHT SHOWER. When the weather records show that an inch of rain has fallen in any part of the country, the downfall Is usually regarded as a “slight shower.” But insignificant as it seejps, if spread over a large area the inch of rain assumes sensational, even staggering, pioportions. If, for example, a downfall of an inch were recorded over the whole of the United Kingdom, it means that rain has fallen to a weight of 7,692,153,600 tons —a weight far beyond .-the powers of the unaided mind to grasp. Suppose it were possible to collect all the water in this widespread downfall, with the object of transporting it to a central reservoir for storage against a dry season, we should have to requisition every locomotive throughout the earth; and each engine, drawing a load of a third of a thousand tons, would have to make 200 journeys. FLOODING A WHOLE COUNTRY. It would provide a freight of 441,640 tons for every locomotive in the United Kingdom, or five trainloads a day for each working day in a year; while it would take all the horses in the country twelve months to transport it, assuming that each horse made ten journeys daily, hauling a ton of water each journey. So colossal is the weight of our “inch of rain” that it would allow of a distribution of nearly five tons to every man, woman and child living on the earth to-day, or approximately three gallons for every day of the year. If distributed among the people of the United Kingdom each person would have sufficient water to fill a tank fifty feet long and twenty-seven feet wide to a depth of five feet. Let us in fancy dig a canal stretching its length from John o’ Groat’s to Brighton. Let us dig it three miles wide and drain into it the inch of rain that has fallen over Great Britain and Ireland. We shall then find that our canal —more than 600 miles in length—is filled to a depth of five feet five inches; and that it is so wide that along it a couple of thousand motor-boats could voyage abreast from the extreme north to the extreme south of Britain. If we convert the entire county of Middlesex into a gigantic reservoir over 230 square miles in area, our inch of rain will fill it to such a depth that all the world's war fleets, multiplied by ten, could manoeuvre on it.

If the City of London, more than a square mile in area, were girdled with a massive wall towering 9,432 feet high—so high that three Scafells perched one on the top of another would fall short of its height —and into this gigantic tank were poured our thousands of millions of tons of water, representing only a one-inch fall, the tank would be filled to the brim. With our inch of rain we could keep a miniature Niagara falling at the rate of 3,278,000 gallons a minute, running for a whole year. With one minute’s downfall we could allow two and a-half gills to each inhabitant of the United Kingdom; or we could fill a tank a hundred yards square to a depth of only two inches short of six feet. What this inch of rain means to the country in the growth of crops it is almost impossible to say, but even if we assume that the water is worth only a penny for a hundred gallons, it would require a cheque for more than £71.793,000 to pay for it, or as much gold as 11,000 men could carry if each man had a burden of a little over a hundredweight. Alongside the figures regarding an inch of rain, the statistics of a really wet day are staggering. One can but magine, for instance, what a tremendous deluge Ardrishaig, in Argyllshire, experienced in 1863, when seven inches of rain fell Within twenty-four hours. In the same period, at Darjeeling, by the way, no less than twenty inches was once recorded.