The Flamingo Incident

CATH and Alan Fincher will be meeting representatives of Canal & River Trust (CaRT) in the near future to discuss the incident where a volunteer failed to take appropriate action when their historic narrowboat, Flamingo, hung up in a lock.

This occurred at Hillmorton on the Northern Oxford Canal, with the announcement of a meeting coming just 24 hours after the Trust acknowledged a request under the Freedom of Information Act to determine progress made to date on a report of the incident.

No response

Whilst the incident happened on the 25th August and was reported shortly afterwards, Alan Fincher complained on the 22nd October, some eight weeks later, that no response had been received from CaRT adding ‘We have made it very clear to the South East Waterways manager, Vicky Martin, that this is unsatisfactory, and have been promised it is being expedited'.

It has been subsequently pointed out to Alan that if he had made a complaint at the time the Trust would have replied within 20 working days.

Drum Major

It was just a week ago that narrowboatworld published Drum Major Again? The article, which was based on volunteer lock keeper training documents, and used the Flamingo incident as an example, asked 'Will it take another Drum Major incident to make Canal & River Trust ensure that volunteer lock keepers are properly trained to deal with 'cilling' and hang-up emergencies?'

The article generated a topic on CanalWord Discussion Forum which resulted in 436 posts and 13,452 hits.

[To date it has been viewed 10,799 times in narrowboatworld.]