Every winter, your gifts help us carry out vital works even when the weather is against us. At Bank Dole Lock, you helped get the job done as planned, despite an overwhelming flood.
Flooding at Bank Dole Lock on the Aire & Calder Navigation, near Knottingley in West Yorkshire
It’s important to keep our canals and rivers open and working in the busy summer months, which is why we carry out major works in winter. But of course, that means we run the risk of winter storms affecting scheduled work. Whilst unexpected incidents are hard to plan for, your regular support make a huge difference and allows our teams on the ground to respond around the clock, even in the worst of conditions.
This winter was one of the wettest on record, with parts of the UK experiencing unprecedented rainfall. And our colleagues in West Yorkshire bore the brunt, as work to replace lock gates at Bank Dole Lock on the Aire & Calder Navigation was interrupted by severe flooding.
Bank Dole Lock sits on a broad, 11-mile section of canal built to bypass some of the shallower, more meandering parts of the River Aire. When construction manager Paul Arksey and his team began the planned repairs there in November, they had no idea what was about to transpire. Paul explains:
“This job had been planned well in advance, our lock gate workshops had hand-crafted a pair of 6-metre-high, 3.5-metre-wide and 4.3 tonne lock gates, some of the largest we’ve ever produced. Everything was good to go for the winter stoppage. We’d drained the lock, put in the stop planks, and begun removing the old lock gates. And then the wet weather hit us.”
Overnight, on 15 November, as Storm Claudia swept the country, water levels on the nearby River Aire swelled, pouring into the Bank Dole Cut and flooding the surrounding area. By the following day, Lock 5 was underwater.
Lock 5 on the Bank Dole Cut following extensive flooding last November
Paul describes the force of the water: “The river came up really, really quickly. It lifted up the stop planks and flooded the lock, putting the project back to square one. We had to act fast to salvage the site, so we dammed off both ends of the lock and started to pump out the water. We’re really grateful to everyone who helped us be there to keep these vital and major works on track.”
The Aire & Calder Navigation still carries around two million tonnes of commercial freight a year, with cargoes of oil, sand and gravel ferried from ports on the River Humber, Goole and beyond. Historically, a local chemical plant used the Bank Dole Cut for transport, and this posed an unexpected set of challenges for Paul and the team.
As he explains: “Over the years, as they loaded the barges up with tar and other substances, inevitably, there were spillages, and when the area flooded in November, some residual toxic material was stirred up and leaked into the lock. So, before work could restart, we had to engage a specialist company to come and pump out the contaminants. That was a big hurdle, and it really put us on the back foot.”
Thankfully, once the offending material was cleared and the site deemed safe, work resumed. Incredibly, thanks to the skill and determination of Paul and the team, new gates were still installed and the project completed before Christmas as planned, minimising disruption for commercial boat traffic.
The lock gates at Bank Dole Lock are the largest ever crafted at our Stanley Ferry workshop
But the outcome could have been very different without your generous support. Our winter work schedule is ambitious, and we’d always like to do more, but it is an uphill battle. Yet your gifts mean our colleagues are always ready to react, and keep our centuries-old canals flowing, 365 days of the year.
