Thames Barrier
Wednesday, 18th January 2006 by Alex Turnbull
This is the bizarre-looking Thames Barrier on the River Thames, London. Opened in the 1980s, the barrier is designed to protect London's low-lying areas from flooding, and is the world's second-largest movable flood barrier (after the Oosterscheldekering in the Netherlands - no hi-res though I'm afraid).
Between each of the piers are the gates themselves, which rotate up out of the water to form the flood barrier. In the image captured on Google Maps you can see that one of the gates has been rotated into what looks like the 'underspill' position, to allow for maintenance.
For lots of information and some good photography check out the Thames Barrier Wikipedia page.
Thanks to neil, Reagan Blundell, Alan, Lee Bennett, Dee and Tim Reid.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
There are some other (smaller but still cool looking) flood control barriers in Osaka, Japan on eack of the rivers leading out of the bay.
Look at this one in Google Earth at 34.651081,135.478879.
mwa, oke its nice BUT: it’s made of a lot of different doors. In Rotterdam we have one with only two doors/slides which are mounted on the worlds largest hydrolic hinges.
The Thames flood barriers are mentioned in the February 2006 Scientific American article about the New Orleans flood; it includes some nice diagrams of the Thames mechanism and a photo of the gates.
Yntze; the article I mentioned above also includes diagrams and a photograph of the Maeslant barrier in Rotterdam. 🙂
This helped me with my homework in a way..ty