Tag Archives: Flooding

Canoes in Chiswick Mall

A party of fully-equipped kayakers in Chiswick Mall. Note the dashed white line up the middle of the road, and the parked cars! In the background is the River Thames, a Houseboat, and Chiswick Eyot, a nature reserve in the river.

Chiswick Mall, like Strand-on-the-Green, is a low-lying riverside street here in Chiswick. At High Water on a Spring Tide, the streets regularly flood, but not always as much as this … and in 20 years, I never saw kayakers here before! So I was delighted to get this shot.

Diagram by Jhbdel on Wikimedia Commons under CC-by-SA 3.0 license

For landlubbers who’re a bit rusty on what a Spring Tide is, the tides follow the moon’s 28-and-a-half day cycle from Full Moon (opposite the sun) via half-moon (right angles to the sun) and New Moon (roughly in line with the sun, when eclipses sometimes occur). There is a high tide roughly twice a day (and a low tide twice also); every Full Moon, High Tide (High Water) is especially high, as the pulls from the moon and the sun on the oceans have maximum collaborative effect then.

Gunnersbury Triangle Damselflies Egg-Laying Like There’s No Tomorrow!

Shimmer and sparkle: many pairs of ovipositing Azure Damselflies – seven seen here, there were at least fifteen pairs, not to mention …#

Large Red Damselfly (there were several pairs)

Male Bluetail Damselfly on a reed leaf: there were two males tussling, but no female as yet

Yellow and Orange ‘escaped’ Goldfish in GT pond. Perhaps people think ‘setting them free’ when moving house will be a good thing, but they devastate native pond life

Netty with jigsaw cutting out pond minibeasts

(24 May 2018) White-Lipped Land Snail

(27 May 2018) Flooded GT paths after thunderstorm – I never saw the water table THIS high

GT seasonal pond flooded over path, yes, that’s the main path on the right there

GT looking not its best after floods – car parts, bits of fence, railway sleepers, erosion scour, rubbish-filled silt …