It was one of the worst floods in the history of the world.
It took the lives of at least 240 people in Sheffield and left over 5,000 homes and businesses underwater. For Victorian England, the Sheffield Reservoir Disaster was the worst disaster that devastated the country, according to Oliver Wright at the BBC. Many scholars at the time said it was “the single greatest natural catastrophe of the century in Britain.”
In the words of Peter Machan, author of The Sheffield Flood:
According to an 1865 account in The Engineer, a London-based engineering magazine, the flood cost £400,000 worth of property. The flood came down a reservoir from Bradfield, a parish in England northwest of Sheffield, and destroyed tremendous property in the city.
This is the story of the Sheffield Flood, the worst natural disaster in 19th century Britain.
The cause of the flood
The flood was caused by the bursting of an embankment in a reservoir. The reservoir that flooded Sheffield was called the Bradfield Reservoir (named after a town eight miles away from Sheffield), which was held back by the Dale Dyke Dam. The Bradfield Reservoir was built in the previous five years to give a supply of running water to the neighboring city of Sheffield.
The Dale Dyke Dam was created to hold back the reservoir, and it was up to 90 feet deep, 500 feet wide, and 100 feet high. It blocked the path of the River Loxley.
One quarryman said there was a hole in the dam, which was “only about wide enough to admit a penknife.” But the crack had widened by the time others were alerted. An engineer, John Gunson, came to try to patch up the hole. He was convinced the dam would hold, but his attempts were unsuccessful, and the dam was breached.
In 47 minutes, the reservoir was completely empty. Some of the water came down the hill at 18 miles per hour. Down the hill, at Sheffield and neighboring towns, people were screwed. In Sheffield, the water came up to four feet.
At the time, what caused the disaster was obvious to The Engineer: there was too much water. The government said it had a duty to “protect the public from further disasters of the kind.”
Sheffield, at the time, was a rapidly growing city. It grew from around 45,000 people at the beginning of the 19th century to over 185,000 in the middle of the 19th century.
A company called the Sheffield Waterworks Company created the Dale Dyke Dam. The city needed a source of clean water.
Further details were later revealed about the dam. First, there was a strong wind on the day, and it was the first time the dam had ever been filled up at all. Overall, 650 million gallons of water went down the hill into Sheffield. Shane Ewen at Environment and History says the water was coming down the valley at 18 miles per hour. Along with Sheffield, various villages around the city were also flooded.
In some places, nine feet of water submerged the city, and the city suffered unprecedented property damage. For the Sheffield Waterworks Company, the awful flood was terribly bad PR. It had three other reservoirs, and the company defended the flood as a terrible accident caused by land slippage.
But politicians did not buy that defense. For many, the engineers of the dam had failed. The politicians claimed the engineers cut corners and ignored problems with the dam’s design. A group of internationally-recognized engineers criticized their colleagues for their engineering failures, which at the time was unheard of.
Takeaways
At the time, it was a more systemic problem in the world of engineering. Many Victorian engineers claimed they could, in the words of Ewen, “claim[ed] to possess the tools to tame nature for man’s benefit.”
But a community of engineers similarly decried the actions of the engineers at the Dale Dyke Dam and said they didn’t control nature when it mattered. At the time, the field of engineering was not as developed as it currently is, which led to significant risk-taking.
The flood killed infants as well as the elderly. It killed a tremendous amount of wildlife. After the flood, journalist Samuel Harrison published A Complete History of the Great Flood at Sheffield, which memorialized the flood.
The government inspectors blamed the engineers and the Sheffield Waterworks Company, making the company liable for all property damages and loss of life that accompanied the flood.
Harrison recounted this verdict from the government:
However, a century later, engineers found the real problem was the use of puddle clay for the dam, which was too weak to hold back that much volume of water.
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This post was previously published on Frame of Reference.
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