When I was daily walking to the station - I would , time permitting find a stick and do some citizen drain clearing to clear pooled water. Always leaves. Spotted others , often dog walkers doing similar.
Perhaps they factor this in.
Which is not surprising. If it was silted up then the u-bend will have been full too... and you can be certain that nobody will have addressed that problem. So the catch-pit will just have gradually silted up until it is visibly full again, while the rainwater might just have drained away through cracks in the main pot - or evaporated off.I noticed this morning that the drain I mentioned upthread in post #7 that was done a coulle of months back after several years has now silted back up again. Hardly surprising when the other three drains upstream of it weren’t cleared, so it is doing the work of all four.
I have been nagging about certain drains for years. What is especially amusing is that the council tells blatant lies. My local councillor assured me that a particular drain had been sorted when it blatantly hadn't. It was still full of silt. Does the council think I'm too stupid to check? Or perhaps the people paid to do the job just didn't bother but said they had done it. Any attempt to get the drainage system working again will cost millions. So I guess I need to accept that it's permanently broken. Fortunately I live up a hill, so my house isn't going to get flooded.I am genuinely considering, on retirement, buying a second hand gully sucker / drain cleaner and going around the streets of Hertfordshire doing guerilla drain clearance. I must have reported some of the drains near us a dozen times now. It is so simple to do, and so frustrating when it is not done - or worse - not done properly.
One actually got done about 3 months back (after 6 years of reporting it), but I genuinely can’t fathom why they just did that one, and not the four similarly blocked within a 50 metre radius. It would have taken them another 30 minutes, and solved it.
As an aside, St Albans District Council got so annoued with Herts County Council re gutter sweeping that they took on the role themsleves, and to be fair they do a pretty good job of it. However the drains and gullies are a highways asset and thus clearance of them still rests with the county. Trying to engage the district council politicians in the subject is somewhat fruitless.
That depends how many drains there are. Somewhere the size of Reading must have thousands. Let's assume that a lorry can pump out one drain every 10 minutes. If the staff do an eight hour shift, they will need time to get to and from the depot so let's say they can do seven hours work. That's 42 drains a day. If they work Monday to Friday, that's 260 x 42 = 10,920. I think any moderate size town will have more drains than that. As you say, smaller towns and villages could share a vehicle.Just out of interest, how much use would a normal gully cleaning vehicle see per Local Authority area? If, for example, Wokingham, Bracknell & Reading councils all purchased the same number of vehicles, but the overall usage was less than 120 days per year per council, then surely they would save money by either combining forces to purchase 1/3 of the number of vehicles and sharing out the usage or setting up a joint contract with their service provider of choice.
It seems councils are increasingly reliant on volunteers to do their job for them.When I was daily walking to the station - I would , time permitting find a stick and do some citizen drain clearing to clear pooled water. Always leaves. Spotted others , often dog walkers doing similar.
Perhaps they factor this in.
I am genuinely considering, on retirement, buying a second hand gully sucker / drain cleaner and going around the streets of Hertfordshire doing guerilla drain clearance. I must have reported some of the drains near us a dozen times now. It is so simple to do, and so frustrating when it is not done - or worse - not done properly.
One actually got done about 3 months back (after 6 years of reporting it), but I genuinely can’t fathom why they just did that one, and not the four similarly blocked within a 50 metre radius. It would have taken them another 30 minutes, and solved it.
As an aside, St Albans District Council got so annoued with Herts County Council re gutter sweeping that they took on the role themsleves, and to be fair they do a pretty good job of it. However the drains and gullies are a highways asset and thus clearance of them still rests with the county. Trying to engage the district council politicians in the subject is somewhat fruitless.