Photo credits

The Embalse de Riano in northern Spain. The picture was taken by .... me!

Monday, July 9

Supporting son, seeing spillway

Took my son to an open day at his future university on Saturday. Looks really good. I think he will have a really good time there.


On the way, stopped casually at the reservoir spillway that I designed which is under construction. Looks really good. Co-incidentally met the headworks controller who was able to show me round more formally and we were able to discuss a few points:

• He would have preferred the bare concrete walls to be stone clad (not for me to decide)

• In recent heavy rain some water and spilled from the temporary channel. This was at least in part the contractor’s fault for having an abrupt bend in his temporary diversion channel. Fast-flowing water doesn’t do abrupt bends. So some freshly laid concrete had been damaged and they had to do it again and were now moaning that they had lost all their profit in the job.

• I was concerned that we had put the ‘compensation flow measurement’ device in the wrong location, omitting one flow stream, but he set my mind at rest that when this flow stream was operation the compensation flow would not be measured anyway.

And so on.

Also over the weekend, helped the same son with his scholarship application. We have been trying to get on to this for weeks but there always seemed to be something in the way. The deadline Midnight Sunday – loomed and concentrated our minds. So while he desperately scribbled answers to the questions onto reams of paper I typed them frantically into the online form. We finally hit the ‘submit’ button just as the clock turned to 00:00!

Which is technically past midnight, so I hope they still allow the application.

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