3-016-825 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Bradfield Reservoir, near Sheffield: the gap in the Dale Dyke embankment - from a sketch by our special artist, 1864. Scene of '...a terrible disaster...involving the sudden destruction of several hundred human lives...[due to] the bursting of the Sheffield Water Company's reservoir at Bradfield...We see what a gap was made [at] the Dale Dyke Embankment, clean cut away from the hill on each side...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...This cataract rushed down into the Loxley Valley, and...spread out over the lowlands and nether valleys...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...more than a hundred dead bodies which had been picked up when the flood subsided, or dug cut of the mud or the ruins, were exposed to the public view at the Sheffield workhouse'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.