Inert reach Longwater road entrance. Will rain now stop play? 3rd October 2021

Well. What a week that was! Loads of loonies, clogging up roads and petrol stations, panic buying, due to mass hysteria whipped up by the media. My partner and I actually managed to fuel up, on Wednesday, after walking 4 miles to see if either BP or Tesco in Wokingham had petrol.

I was down to 1/8 of a tank, whilst my partner's fuel needle was in the red. She is a teacher, and so needs petrol to get to work.

However, as I  waited in the queue (which only lasted 10 minutes) it was obvious that people were ignoring government advice to buy petrol normally. Drivers, on seeing the BP station had fuel, were slowing down, some even moving to the right turn lane, before deciding to drive on. They were only taking the opportunity to top up!!! That's panic buying.

I like the idiots who queued for 3 hours in an attempt to get into a petrol station that was closed! No one thought to walk up to the station to see if it was open. Or the other lunatic drivers, who followed a tanker for tens of miles, only to discover it was carrying mortar!!! It was a bog standard, double depth cement carrier!!!!

Anyway, enough of the crass stupidity of sections of the British public. What have Inert been up to this week? Have they been affected by the loony panic buyers? Well, it seems not.

Much to my astonishment, Inert did what I predicted they would do. Their up fill progress has reached the Longwater road entrance. I was so gob smacked that they didn't flit off to another part of the site.

The up fill is looking all lovely and flat, and appears contoured to accommodate some ponds. This is hard to determine, as restoration plans keep changing.

I think Inert have been using big, yellow heavy earth movers to transport spoil. Tyre tracks seem to indicate this. They have also been using the south vehicle track, rather than trundling over the land mass and latest up fill.

Unfortunately, their timing couldn't have been worse. The heavens have opened up, over the past week, with lots of torrential rain. While the site as a whole has firm footing, there is one section of the south vehicle track which, over the years, I have found to be extremely boggy, and constantly water logged. I have had to take detours around one particular depression (which always has water in it) on many an occasion.

Well, the vehicles have really churned up this particular, small area, resulting in ruts up to 3' or 90cm deep. I suspect lorries took a slight detour, around this area, when the rutting got too bad, but even this detour started to get deeply rutted.

I am quite baffled as to why this area was not reinforced with the tons of hardcore (bricks, concrete slabs, etc) that is lying around the site. Much like they did with the land bridges.

Worse still, it absolutely bucketed it down, yesterday. Virtually all day, and well into the night. Although the Met office predict a dry couple of weeks to follow, there are saying more torrential rain on Tuesday morning.

​Thus, I am unsure as to how much progress, if any, Inert will make over the next week. Sigh, they were going so well.