3-016-824 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The village of Bradfield, near Sheffield, scene of the late floods - from a sketch by our special artist, 1864. Scene of '...a terrible disaster...involving the sudden destruction of several hundred human lives...[caused by] the bursting of the Sheffield Water Company's reservoir at Bradfield...It seems, unhappily, that...the thickness of the embankment was only 40 ft [when it] ought to have had a thickness of 54 ft...we may try to conceive the sudden outpouring by this channel of a hundred millions of cubic feet of water - that is, two million tons weight of water all discharged at once into the valleys below! This is the quantity, as near as it can be estimated, the reservoir, when quite full, containing 113,000,000 cubic feet... there must have been a pressure of nearly two tons and a half upon each square foot at the base of the embankment...This cataract rushed down into the Loxley Valley...overturning everything in its way - factories, workshops, and cottages where people lay quietly in their beds. Laden with fragments of the ruined houses, pieces of furniture, and dead human bodies, the flood poured into the River Don, which rose and submerged a great part of Neepsend, a suburb of Sheffield, where many persons were drowned'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.