Morecambe Bay has some of the most dangerous tides in Britain. Colin Berry has the responsibility of operating the Arnside Tide Siren. He talks about his work in this short video.
It would be better if the siren played a voice announcement after sounding as it might prevent people from walking back out again; it is a Hormann so it is capable of that
My father and I visited his cousins in England several years ago. They took us on a short trip to Arnside and explained the sirens as well as the awful tragedy of the people who drowned some time before that. Now I live on the Bay of Fundy which has great tide levels, but not the other dangers of the sea bed.
Do they have sirens at Fundy to warn everyone about the tides? Can you be drowned fast by incoming tides at Fundy, and other places near there with real high tides, do all those places have these sirens?
I thought the times were a bit confusing as given during the conversation, but I guess the bore can vary a lot depending on winds and the amount of flow coming down the river. As I understand it the first siren means the bore will be there in a half hour or so and the second siren means the bore is imminent.
Have the same problem with idiots around the North West Norfolk coast. They ignore all the warnings because it won't happen to them, so the Hunstanton RNLI Hovercraft gets a lot of use each summer.
We have Manukau Harbour here in Auckland, just as treacherous. My children and us drive to the other calm side of Auckland with safer beaches! My husband never launches his boat there either, he says it's treacherous
I nearly got caught out in morcambe bay. You dont see the gullies till its to late and the quick sand!!. It took me 40 minutes to get back to dry solid ground. Terrifying!. When your out there, there is no sound and even if you shouted it would be dampened by the bay. Ive seen the sea come in once with waves as high as ten foot traveling as fast as a car with the wind behined it. The sound is a massive Rush of sound. You have to respect the sea especially in morcambe bay.
I have 2 questions: 1- Do quicksands "work" underwater? What I mean is, if you are in a river and step on a spot where there was quicksand before the tidal rose, will it still get you and make you sink? Or its mechanism eventually change as long as the quicksand is underwater after some time? That is, if I enter a full river, do I run the risk of stepping on submerged quicksand and die? 2- What would be a hidden channel?
It is possible to still sink in quicksand when underwater as humans are more dense than water and can still sink. The main threat is being trapped in the quicksand whilst the tide comes in. In my experience, a hidden channel is a deeper section of water which is not visible from the surface.
@@aaronwilson9465 but as you walk through it during low tide, wouldn't it be expected for you to notice a channel as you step in some deeper area? 🤔 I think I'm not picturing it yet.
It depends on how much water there is. Quicksand itself only really becomes a problem when the sand or dirt is very deep and thin enough to trap your entire body in a relatively short time or if you’re stuck alone and the tide is rolling in, but the truth of the matter is that dying in quicksand is even less of a risk if you know how to take care of it. Humans are less dense than dirt and the vast majority of people float in water, so quicksand, which is made of dirt and water, is not something you can easily sink completely into anyway. If you add in water, assuming it’s not an unbelievably scary tidal bore like the one in the video, it will actually it make it a bit easier to get out of quicksand. The mechanism of quicksand doesn’t change when it is underwater since it remains saturated with water regardless of wether it is underwater. What does change is the way that you as a person interact with the quicksand. Assume that you are knee deep in some quicksand and the water is up to your waist. To free yourself, all you would need to do is sit down and wiggle your legs. As you wiggle your legs the soil immediately around your legs will liquefy faster than the rest of the soil and the soil by your knee, at the barrier between the soil and the water, is liquefying even faster because it is over saturated by the overabundant water above it. The soil around your knee then turns to a similar consistency of water and becomes less like watery dirt and more like dirty water, this process will move all the way down your legs as the water creeps into the space between your legs and the quicksand making it easier for you to move. The only thing preventing you from completely pulling your legs out at that point is the form of your leg left in the mud not being ideal for pulling an entire foot through it. Of course, with less amounts of water, the effect is lessened and the more it behaves like normal quicksand, so it really depends. However, so long as the tide isn’t too fast, you should be perfectly capable of freeing yourself from quicksand before it poses a danger to your life. Of course, most people aside from the extremely kinky that seek out these mud holes for their naked kinky purposes tend to stay away from quicksand as a precaution because you never know what might happen, and even though the steps to getting out of quicksand are easy, it usually leves you very exhausted which isn’t exactly a help if getting away from a rising tide is your next immediate goal. I hope this helped.
@@empanada65 yes, this helped a lot! Thank you for the lesson. And yeah, I know about the people with "kinky purposes"... haha, I've seen a few here on YT. 🙄 Well, knowing that there are even submerged quicksands just confirms the conclusion I had already come to: lakes and rivers are dangerous as hell for this and many other reasons. The sea doesn't have all those lakes and rivers traps, so I'll keep the sea, thank you.
My understanding of the hidden channels here are that at low tide you cannot tell that there are channels bordering the bay that will fill first behind you while you are still on dry land in the middle, cut off now from safety and yet possibly still unaware that the tide is about to come in and get you and that there is already no where for you to run.
20 knots speed pretty dicey, though, if something were to go wrong -debri in water knocking u over or whatever... has anyone been attacked by a shark by the incoming??!
Agreed. I suspect he was exaggerating, but he was making the point that it travels faster at the sides and cuts you off, plus he mentioned that the effects of wind can speed it up. I believe the Arnside Bore more typically travels at around ten mph.
