Why did the ESB flood Cork?

But cork is not a city so it does not matter.

kpbdublin wrote: »

Does anybody know why the ESB released a surge of water from the dam to flood the city of Cork with such devastating effect?
The media have have not really explained this adequately Would the dam have burst if they had not done this - or was there a danger of a completely uncontrolled flood?
Was the water release botched? Could they not have released it in a more controlled fashion? According to one report the water release was delayed because they were searching for a body in the river? Does anybody know about this?
I understand that the ESB informed the public via a warning on its website. Was that the extent of the warning and was it completely inadequate?

They had been searching the rivers for the missing student, and the usual routine is to let the damn build up in order to lower the water line to aid the search for missing individuals.

However in this case, they should have thought it through more carefully. They had all the indications that there would be catastrophic weather this weekend, and rather than letting the water ebb out from the dam over the days befoore the rain began to fall, they opened the sluices and let 800 tonnes of water a second out compounding the bad weather, and adding to the mayhem.

There's a lot of divided opinion on this subject, but I think it's fair to say that Cork would have had flooding anyway, but the ESB emptying out the dam made the flooding far more pronounced. We could have done without that extra few million litres sloshing around the city.

Because letting the dam burst would be very clever!

Wow, the anti-Cork posts are so entertaining ¬_¬

If flooding could have been avoided then obviously they would have avoided it. There was such a massive amount of rain, and the Inniscarra Dam has a catchment area of 350 sq. miles or something, so the resevoir would have been very full regardless.

I thought Cork was lighter than water - why didn't it float?

Dudess wrote: »

I'm Cork born and bred (boy) - it's only a bit of fun.

Seriously, there are times all right when people post stupidly anti Cork comments (and they're not being humorous) as well as anti everywhere else comments. But there's been nothing of the sort here these past few days.

I'm not trying to sound really sensitive about it, I laughed when I was walking around with my friend on friday I just meant they're not funny! I'm not really talking about bad taste or anything :P

It's either 800 tonnes a second .

Or 800 thousand tonnes a second.

Your call, Cork.

paconnors wrote: »

well if the lads in cork removed the cork from the lee all the water would go down the drain, Theres ur solution

Very poor joke.