Leeds River Lock needs repairs

THE Canal & River Trust tell that works are required to River Lock (1) on the Leeds & Liverpool.

For it is struggling to achieve a level and is consuming an unusually high amount of water that on occasion leaves Granary Wharf basin above short of water, preventing onward navigation, Keith Gudgin reports.

There are now restricted opening hours while engineers  have 'worked to develop a solution'.

Repairs between May and July

But repairs will not be carried out until between May and July. 

It was considered to save this work until winter, the trust giving a number of reasons why this is not really practical.  Here are those reasons in full, their being somewhat involved:

'Carrying out the works now, avoids working in a river in winter. The risk of flooding is higher in winter and our recent experiences of flooding across the country suggested that minimising this risk as much as possible was preferable to ensure as smooth as practical a programme. A further consideration was the unknown nature of the defect to the lock. The lock is losing a lot of water from, a not as yet fully diagnosed defect. With this uncertainty there is the potential it could get worse and fail unexpectedly. As this is a significant structure connecting the canal with the river and the pound above the lock is a popular site for visiting boats, we were concerned that the impact of a failure at this location would be higher than at other locations on the canal. Because of the defect, the lock currently needs to be manned by our team and this takes resource away from the maintenance of the canal. We are not able to man it all times due to resource limitations and so this already limits when boaters can currently go through the lock. We appreciate this decision is not ideal but hope you can understand our reasoning; our aim is to ensure the lock is fully operational as soon as possible.'