Fund raising simul

[Mick Norris]

Gormally

Sunday 7 February, raising funds for Calderdale Flood Relief

A positive story for the ECF and chess press to spread to the wider public

[Andrew Bak]

One week to go before this simul.

If you're unable to attend, please consider contributing towards the Calderdale Flood Relief.

[Joey Stewart]

Wow, that is pretty heavy flooding - first I have heard of it, were any chess players affected?

Hope you raise a good amount to help rebuild the flood walls.

[MartinCarpenter]

It got quite a lot of coverage when it happened, but then a lot of the North of the country got hit at once

I haven't asked anyone but there's a reasonably active Calderdale chess league and all of Hebden Bridge, Brighouse and Todmorden chess club have their venues next to the Calder and I can't imagine they avoided flooding. Hopefully minimal equipment loss. Calderdale in the Yorkshire league play out of Halifax so should be fine.

The towns do rise up the valley sides quite fast, so even with that 2700 figure for houses, the biggest problem is all the commercial properties down by the river. No fun at all

Not their first floods by any means. Its a really lovely corner of the world, but sadly rather prone to flooding. Narrowish, steep sided valley with even narrower/steeper feeder streams. Great for water powered mills back in the day! Its down in the gap in this photo.

[Gavin Strachan]

if only they built the town at the top of the hill rather than the bottom...

[MartinCarpenter]

It'd be exposed to some awfully wild weather up on the tops! Not high in absolute terms but really quite exposed.

Definitely (as there often are I guess) questions about whether having all that building, and especially commercial property, down by the river is truly intelligent, but its all there now so it'd be very hard to fix Nothing that much they can really do by way of sane flood defences.

[Gavin Strachan]

houses on stilts it is then!

[Joey Stewart]

It makes me angry, these corrupt developers bribing planning officers to give them 'permission' to put large amounts of building into flood plains, taking their ill gotten gains and running off, and then leaving everyone else to foot the bill through increased insurance premiums.

There should really be a law to prosecute those involved with these processes - they have created a huge problem which will be ongoing for the rest of the time those buildings sit there.

[MartinCarpenter]

Checking on wiki it actually looks quite interesting with Hebden bridge - way back when the valley had lots of marshes in it, the pack horse route did stick to the tops of the hills and so did the original settlement in the area. Something round the river too as it was a crossing point.

Then industrial revolution, valley drained, road stuck through it and lots of mills/workers cottages etc came in. I imagine those sorts of land use would have been basically very flood resistant. That, or of very minimal perceived value in the case of workers houses

Then all the industry ups and leaves and it all gets converted into shops/houses etc and you have a major problem. Definitely not as simple as plain broken planning (in this case anyway!).

[Andrew Bak]

Wow, that is pretty heavy flooding - first I have heard of it, were any chess players affected?

Hope you raise a good amount to help rebuild the flood walls.

I'm not aware of any chess venues being affected, but I have no idea if any of the players have been caught up in it.

I know a couple of chess players local to the area the went to help down in the immediate aftermath, some people were hit really badly

[Allan Hodgkinson]

I believe tonight's One Show, BBC 1, comes from Hebden Bridge.

[Andrew Bak]

Interview with Dave Shapland on BBC Radio Leeds this morning:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03gtg80#play

Starts at about 1hr 25 in.

[Mick Norris]

Andy

How did the simul go?

[MartinCarpenter]

Looks from the twitter feed on the Yorkshire chess site that Andy might have reason to be modest about it

+14,=6,-3 and >700 pounds all sound like good going
(Definitely doesn't look like it was a remotely easy field for that size of simul.).

[Mick Norris]

Looks from the twitter feed on the Yorkshire chess site that Andy might have reason to be modest about it

I know, that's why I thought I would give him the chance