We’ve been away for two weeks. We got back a couple of days ago and learned this morning that a 22-inch water pipe burst about a week ago and deprived large parts of Edinburgh of water. Some houses had no water for three days.
We heard about it because a water main burst today, and the question of how long the repair would take was a talking point. In fact, the repair was done quickly.
The burst main reminded me of a conversation I had in the American Museum in Bath, which we visited last week. The photo here is a panoramic shot of the room at it would have been a couple of hundred years ago.
The light was low, so the photo is pixelated and full of noise, but I hope you get the idea.
The person I met and I discussed how ‘near to the edge’ people lived in some of the frontier regions.
If things went wrong there was perhaps no backup, no one to come to their aid. And we talked about how today the infrastructure that keeps everything ticking along gives us so much but is only as resilient as the weakest link.
Imagine if the water supply was cut off for longer. Then people would have to make the rounds with water bowsers. But if disease spread because of the lack of water, maybe that would cause a further breakdown.
It all seems tightly wound and I wonder what would cause it to fail – not that I want to find out.
By the way, header image that is currently at the top of this site is the view over the hills and valley at the rear of the American Museum in Bath.
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