That’s Ballina, Co Tipperary, on the Shannon, opposite Killaloe.
Looking upstream
The ramp
Looking downstream
From the railway footbridge
Photos taken on 1 January 2016.
The pontoon seems to be more severely affected than it was in the last big floods, on 22 November 2009.
From across the river
From the bridge
Sometimes you have to wonder about politicians and their grasp of reality. Take, for instance, young Mr Adams, Sinn Féin TD for Louth. There he was in the Dáil the other day, talking about flooding on the Shannon, and saying (amongst other things):
No single agency is responsible for the management of the River Shannon. Will the Taoiseach give full responsibility to the OPW for management of the Shannon?
Can Mr Adams have forgotten that, under the Good Friday Agreement, a cross-border implementation body called Waterways Ireland, reporting jointly to the Minister for Fairytales in the republic and the Minister for Marching Bands [a Sinn Féin MLA] in Northern Ireland, is responsible for navigation on certain named waterways including the Shannon?
Giving the Office of Public Works full responsibility for the management of the Shannon would require renegotiation of the Good Friday Agreement [and perhaps some later agreements]. I gather that the members of HM Devolved Administration in Northern Ireland delight in doing that sort of thing, but reducing the powers of the largest of the cross-border implementation bodies might not be wise.
Posted in Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Ireland, Irish waterways general, Modern matters, Operations, People, Politics, Shannon, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged cross-borsder implementation bodies, drainage, flood, Gerry Adams, Good Friday agreement, Shannon, Sinn Fein
According to the Shannon Catchment-based Flood Risk Assessment and Management (CFRAM) Study Technical Assessment: River Shannon Level Operation Review [PDF: Office of Public Works v2_0 July 2012]
ESB collects and maintains records of rainfall, river and lake levels and flow data. Even though ESB has no responsibility to supply flood warnings under their regulations, it issues twice weekly lake level forecasts to all the relevant stakeholders since 2010.
Those stakeholders include Waterways Ireland.
As the levels of the lakes are of great interest to boat-owners and others, it would be really nice if either the ESB or Waterways Ireland were to publish those forecasts. WI wouldn’t need any elaborate new system: they could send them around as marine notices, and the cost would be minimal.
But perhaps the forecasts are already published somewhere? If, Gentle Reader, you know where they are, do please leave a Comment [preferably with a link] below.
Posted in Drainage, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Irish waterways general, Modern matters, Operations, Safety, Scenery, Shannon, Sources, Tourism, Water sports activities, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged boating, ESB, forecast, Ireland, lake, Shannon, water level, Waterways Ireland
Abbey Bridge
Baal’s Bridge
Mathew Bridge
Current heading for Mathew Bridge
The weir
Lots of pumps running and equipment trundling about the place
Trouble at t’mill
T’millstream
Cots on the bank
The Black Bridge getting another hammering
I have been told that the Mulkear River rose very rapidly on Saturday night and that, at one time, it was feared that the (older) bridge would be swept away. I gather that folk working in other areas were called to Annacotty to deal with the emergency.
The old bridge at Annacotty (downstream face)
A tree in the water above the bridge
There’s a weir in there somewhere
The Mill Bar in Annacotty was closed today after being flooded.
The Mill Bar
This, from a small garden beside the bridge, suggests that the Mulkear may have carried and deposited a lot of silt
I gather that the Mulkear’s waters, added to those of the Shannon itself, raised the level of the Park Canal (the bottom section of the Limerick Navigation). A problem with opening the lock gates, to release the water, meant that a few houses in Corbally were flooded. A Sinn Féin councillor, whose party colleague has been responsible [with her southern counterpart] for slashing Waterways Ireland’s budget in recent years, is quoted as saying
I am in no doubt it was primarily caused by the ineptitude of Waterways Ireland.
Alas, the news story does not tell us the source of the councillor’s certainty.
The article also says that
[…] the force of this water meant it was not possible to open the lock gates by hand.
That is, I think, misleading: neither set of gates has gate beams, so they are not opened by hand.
The upper gates in 2004, shortly after installation. Note the absence of gate beams. Note also the two sluices or paddles on each gate
Control pedestal and gear
The upper gates open today
I see no sign of the paddles or sluices. Perhaps the level is so high that they’re underwater. I must try to check next time I’m at the canal harbour.
The upper gates in the floods of 2009
In the floods of 2009 the upper gates were held slightly open and all four sluices were discharging water. That would have lowered the level in the canal; it would also, I think, have made it easier to open the gates fully.
I am guessing, but I imagine that on Saturday night some sort of hydraulic machine was brought in this way …
Two bollards have been moved from the gateway and stacked beside it
… and used to push or pull open the near-side upper gate. There seems to be some slight damage to the stone and iron work.
Slight damage
One other possibility that struck me is that silt from the Mulkear might have built up behind the gates, making them difficult to open, but I have no evidence on the matter.
The lower gates
From the outside looking in
Posted in Built heritage, Canals, Charles Wye Williams, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Forgotten navigations, Historical matters, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Modern matters, Operations, Safety, Shannon, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged 2009, Annacotty, Anney River, Baal's Bridge, Black Bridge, bridge, cot, flood, gate, harbour, hydraulics, lock, Mulcair, Mulkear, Park Canal, Plassey, Shannon, silt, University of Limerick, water level
Here is the ESB’s Notifications page, with info on the rate of discharge from its hydroelectric dams and weirs. Today (14 December 2015) Parteen Villa Weir is discharging 440 cumecs (cubic metres per second or, roughly, ton[ne]s per second down the original course of the Shannon. That’s 44 times the 10 cumec usually discharged and more than replaces the 400 cumec diverted through the headrace to the Ardnacrusha power station. The Shannon is therefore running at its pre-Ardnacrusha levels and the Falls of Doonass have regained their power.
Of course if Ardnacrusha didn’t exist, its 400 cumec would be coming down the original course of the Shannon on top of the 440 cumec already there, which would make for interesting levels of flooding.
That ESB page has a link to this infographic, which shows the sort of information I was trying to get across here. I usually start from Leitrim [village]; the ESB starts slightly further upstream at Lough Allen. Note that the Shannon’s few locks are concentrated upstream of Lough Ree: between them and Killaloe are only two locks, at Athlone and Meelick, so the river’s fall is very slight.
Update 2018: the ESB has a new page with lots of interesting information here.
Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Canals, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Modern matters, Operations, Safety, Shannon, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged Ardnacrusha, Athlone, cumec, ESB, Falls of Doonass, flood, Killaloe, Leitrim, lock, Lough Allen, Lough Ree, Meelick, Parteen Villa Weir, power station, river, Shannon
I have not posted charts of Shannon traffic figures for some months now. That was not Waterways Ireland’s fault: it has kindly continued to send the figures to me, but other demands on my time have intervened. However, I have now charted the figures to the end of October 2015, which takes in the bulk of the year’s boating activity. All the usual caveats apply:
On the other hand, the figures do include the Shannon’s most significant tourism activity, the cruiser hire business. And they are our only consistent long-term indicator of usage of the inland waterways.
There has been a very slight increase in total traffic, although it might be better to regard the figures as confirming that traffic has stabilised at the new, lower level established around 2011.
All boats. The slight increase in total traffic seen up to May has continued to October
I commented on the May figures:
The big news is that there is an increase in the amount of hire-boat traffic and a decrease in the amount of private traffic. [Personal observation suggests very little activity on Lough Derg, apart from the sailing bods.]
Again, that trend has continued. Hire-boat traffic is up …
Hire-boat traffic is up
… and private-boat traffic is down.
Private-boat traffic is down
Perhaps the private boats were afraid to move from the new berths in Killaloe where they wanted to spend the winter at Waterways Ireland’s ridiculously low rates. Is this some delayed effect of the death of the Celtic tiger? Or was it the weather? Neither hire nor private figures changed hugely, but change they nonetheless did.
After a brief period when it seemed that private traffic was overtaking hired, the hire-boats are in the lead again
Of course hire-boat traffic fell much further from its 2003 figure: it dropped to 40% and is still not much higher, whereas private traffic is still more than 80% of its 2003 figure.
Change (private and hired) since 2003
It would be nice to have data on other forms of waterways usage.
I don’t know, but here’s a picture of 415 of them flowing through Castleconnell. [Update 13 December: that may be only 405 cumec.]
415 cumecs on 12 December 2015
Actually, a cumec is one cubic metre of water per second, which is roughly one ton per second, which is a lot of water. And 415 cumec is the amount that, according to the blatts, the ESB is currently letting down the original course of the Shannon from Parteen Villa Weir; the minimum flow in that channel, as seen in summer, is 10 cumec.
Younger trees getting their feet wet
Who’d have guessed?
Below the bridge
Above the bridge
Stormont
Pump
Sandbags
Sandbag Central
Sandbags filled here for distribution
Army engineers
More equipment arriving
Ardnacrusha headrace, said to take 400 cumec
Errina bridge on the Plassey-Errina Canal
The stop planks seem to be quite effective …
… as there is little water getting down the canal to Clonlara bridge
Depth gauge at Park Lock
Lock chamber
Full canal upstream
Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Canals, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Forgotten navigations, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Modern matters, Operations, Roads, Shannon, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged 2015, Ardnacrusha, bridge, canal, Castleconnell, clonlara, cumec, depth, Errina, ESB, flood, flow, headrace, lock, Park Canal, Parteen, Parteen Villa, Plassey, Shannon, Stormont, weir
Several organisations maintain sensors that detect water levels; some of them publish their readings on tinterweb.
The Office of Public Works, for example, shows real-time water levels here; this page shows the changes at Banagher over the past thirty-five days. It may be that the ESB’s run-off of water at Parteen Villa Weir has been having some effect.
The Environmental Protection Agency has a list of monitoring stations but you have to swear not to burn down the queen’s dockyards, insult the president or sell your granny before you’re allowed to look at it. When you’ve done that, you can view Hydronet data, but you have to choose your River Basin District first. If you choose the Shannon RBD, you get a list of stations — none of them on the Shannon itself — arranged in no comprehensible order, so you’re on your own after that. Here’s the one at Tyone on the Nenagh River by way of example.
Finally, Waterways Ireland has information here. The page takes quite a while to load. It covers only the waterways for which the body is responsible and information about the current water level (as compared with MSL Malin) is of limited use unless you’ve been monitoring it for some time. And, alas, there is no information on anywhere on the Shannon south of Meelick (Victoria) Weir, presumably because Waterways Ireland can’t control anything south of that.
Who can? The ESB, and I suspect they must have gauges at, say, Killaloe, but if they do I can’t find the readings published anywhere. It would be a boon and a blessing to men if ESB were to publish its information.
There is one other source of information that might help: there are some webcams on Irish rivers. Farsons have several, though none on the Shannon, and at the moment I can’t get any of the Irish ones to work for me.
Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Canals, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Ireland, Modern matters, Operations, Safety, Shannon, Sources, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged EPA, ESB, lakes, monitor, OPW, Rivers, Shannon, water levels, waterways, weirs, WI
From the search terms used, it seems that many people are visiting this site with questions about Parteen Villa Weir, water levels, Shannon floods and so on. They are not this site’s primary focus, but some non-technical information might be of interest.
The best place to start is with this quotation from a former web page of the Shannon International River Basin District:
The Shannon International River Basin District is the largest in Ireland at more than 18,000 km2 in area. It covers the natural drainage basin of the Shannon river itself, stretching from the source of the River Shannon in the Cuilcagh mountains in Counties Cavan and Fermanagh to the tip of the Dingle peninsula in north Kerry. It also includes coastal parts of Kerry and Clare which drain to the sea. It flows through 18 local authority areas and is also an international RBD as a small portion of County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland drains underground to the Shannon Pot.
The district is about one fifth of the area of the island, one quarter the area of the state. Rain that falls on that area of land ends up in the Shannon (or in a few small rivers in Clare and Kerry that flow to the sea). Some goes to the Shannon estuary or its tributaries; most flows into the non-tidal Shannon, which means the river upstream of Limerick.
Ireland has been described as saucer-like, with a high rim and a low flat centre. It’s not entirely true, but there certainly is a very large central plain, and the Shannon flows down through the middle of that. And, because the land it flows through is flat, the river falls very little.
In 113 miles from Leitrim to Killaloe, the Shannon falls just over 30 feet; the navigation channel needs only five locks. [By way of contrast, the Thames has 45 locks over 135 miles; the Trent has 12 locks over 42 miles.] So extra rainwater allows the Shannon to spread out, covering a much wider area, and it takes time for that water to drain away downstream. But many of the rivers that flow into the Shannon have been subjected to drainage schemes, so they can get rid of their flood waters quickly … into the Shannon.
There are some weirs on the Shannon, designed to keep a minimum depth in the river for navigation; there are also some natural obstacles that hold water back. But once the level has risen high enough, water simply flows over the top of the weir, and there is nothing useful anybody can do — apart, of course, from farmers’ representatives and politicians, who can always make use of a photo opportunity.
Almost all the water that enters the non-tidal Shannon will eventually flow through Killaloe, the town at the southern end of Lough Derg [it’s on the west bank, in Co Clare; the east bank is Ballina, in Co Tipperary].
As James Robinson Kilroe wrote in 1907,
[…] we have the formidable barrier at Killaloe, naturally damming up a considerable depth of water in Lough Derg, and the river falling away southward by a series of rapids which correspond with drops in the canal, south of O’Briensbridge […], along an alternative course, possibly one used by a branch of the Shannon.
The diagrams with that article are worth a look.
In the twelve Irish (fifteen statute) miles between Killaloe and the tidewater at Limerick, the river falls about 100 feet: more than three times its fall from Leitrim to Killaloe. In the nineteenth century, the water level at Killaloe used to change by about eleven feet between summer and winter — even without storms. The old Limerick Navigation, including the canal Kilroe mentioned, could drain only a small amount of water (which could put the navigation out of action); the rest went down the river’s original course through the Falls of Doonass.
Nowadays, the Falls of Doonass are a shadow of their former selves, and the water level through O’Briensbridge, Castleconnell and Plassey is much below its previous levels. I suspect that the older, larger trees along the river show the original level, with the newer, smaller trees having grown since the 1920s.
The cause was the construction of a relief drainage channel in the 1920s. This channel is controlled by a weir at Parteen Villa [not to be confused with Parteen].
Actually, of course, it’s not a relief drainage channel. The weir [sometimes referred to as the Hydro Dam] controls the flow of water to the original course of the Shannon [the right-hand or eastern channel, which gets the first 10 cubic metres of water per second] and the headrace for the hydroelectric power station at Ardnacrusha [the left-hand or western channel, which gets the next 400 cubic metres of water per second, 100 for each of its turbines]. The power station was built to use that 100-foot fall of the Shannon, concentrated between Killaloe and Limerick, to generate electricity.
But one effect of the construction of Ardnacrusha was to provide a channel, the power station headrace, capable of taking [at least] 400 cubic metres of water per second away from the original river channel, thus reducing the likelihood of flooding.
Water experts talk about cumecs: a cumec is a flow of one cubic metre, or 1000 litres, of water per second. And a cubic metre of water weighs about one [metric] tonne, which is roughly the same as an imperial ton. So one cumec is one ton of water per second, which is a lot.
It was said, on 8 December 2015, that the ESB, using Parteen Villa Weir, had released 315 cumec down the original course of the Shannon on the previous day and had increased that to 375 cumec. If the Ardnacrusha headrace was getting 400 cumec, then the amount of water being discharged from Lough Derg and the upper Shannon had doubled.
As far as I can see, the Shannon has always flooded. The 2009 floods affected some nineteenth century houses, which I guess would have been flooded even worse before Ardnacrusha was constructed. However, I suspect that more houses have been built on the flood plain since then. But I don’t see that there is any way to prevent Shannon floods.
There is a good article in the Irish Times of 9 December 2015; it will no doubt disappear behind a paywall at some stage.
Here is an ESB infographic about the Shannon.
Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Canals, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Historical matters, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Modern matters, Operations, People, Politics, Safety, Shannon, shannon estuary, Sources, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged Ardnacrusha, Castleconnell, drainage, flood, Killaloe, Limerick, O'Briensbridge, Parteen, Parteen Villa, Plassey, Shannon, water level, weir
Shannonbridge upstream
Shannonbridge downstream
Shannon Harbour: 36th lock
Shannon Harbour: below the 36th
Shannon Harbour: road to Banagher closed
Banagher: the harbour above the bridge
Banagher: the harbour’s sole inhabitant
Banagher: work goes on
Portumna Bridge: Hawthorn moving
Portumna Bridge
Below Portumna Bridge
Above Portumna Bridge
Portumna Bridge: Waterways Ireland yard
Mountshannon
Mountshannon: the main quay
Scarriff: the river in flood
Scarriff: the river flowing on to the road to the harbour
Scarriff: sandbags blocking the road …
… to the Waterways Ireland Shannon HQ. Anyone in the building must have waded there
Tuamgraney
Killaloe: the flash lock
Killaloe bridge from downstream
O’Briensbridge
Water level with the quay at O’Briensbridge
Flooded fields at O’Briensbridge
O’Briensbridge is on the original course of the Shannon, downstream of Parteen Villa Weir, which controls how much water goes via the original course and how much goes to the hydroelectric power station at Ardnacrusha.
Normally, the original course gets the first 10 cubic metres per second (10 cumec, they say) of water and Ardnacrusha gets the next 400, 100 for each of its four turbines. In floods, any excess is sent down the original course, through O’Briensbridge, Castleconnell and Plassey. One newspaper today said that, on Monday 7 December 2015, 315 cumec had been sent down the original course and, on Tuesday 8 December, 375 cumec.
The water levels are still below the peak achieved in November 2009, but there is more to come: as the Shannon drains a very large amount of Ireland, and as it is falls very little in its upper reaches, it takes a long time for the runoff to reach Killaloe and Parteen Villa. It may be that the ESB, which controls Ardnacrusha and Parteen Villa, is now running down the level of Lough Derg to make room for the water that has yet to arrive from the upper Shannon.
Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Modern matters, Operations, Safety, Scenery, Shannon, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged Ardnacrusha, Banagher, cumec, ESB, flood, Killaloe, Mountshannon, O'Briensbridge, Parteen Villa Weir, Portumna, Scarriff, Shannon, Shannon Harbour, Shannonbridge, storm desmond, Tuamgraney, water level
Irish waterways history 