I was reminded of the power of blogs last weekend when I took a daytrip from Horninglow up to Mercia Marina and back. I'd just gone for a pumpout and a quick shop at Mercia Marina.
On the way back I stopped to fill with water at the Willington sanitary station, when a fellow on a boat opposite politely accosted me.
"You don't know me", he said, but I've got a bone to pick with you."
Uh-oh.
"Well, not with you as such..." he said. "It probably wasn't your fault, but you reported something on your blog that wasn't true."
He rolled out the story:
Back in June 2008, in Harecastle Tunnel breakdown, I relayed a story reported in the local Sentinel paper about a boat that broke down in the tunnel, and alerted its distress by sounding the horn, as it was supposed to do.
The paper recorded that when the fire brigade turned up, they were prevented from entering the tunnel by BW staff.
Apparently (reported the Sentinel), they weren't allowed to do so for some sort of 'health & safety' reason. I wrote:
It's astonishing to read the reported refusal of the firemen and BW tunnel staff to go into the tunnel to investigate the problem – despite the boaters saying they sounded their horn and followed all the rules.
If the reports are correct, what is the point of all the preparatory safety rigamarole - of BW staff wearing pointless lifejackets, of tunnel boats, of the sheet of instructions they hand you in the event of breakdown, of all the fearsome warning signs at ever piddly little tunnel over a couple of chains long – if no-one investigates?
On the other hand, you know what newspaper reports are like. The local BW staff might well have a reasonable excuse.
It turns out that the local BW staff did have a reasonable excuse.
My interlocutor, David Fern, said that he was the BW tunnel operator on duty that day, and for three years he's been burning at being misrepresented by the local paper ... and by Narrowboat World, and by a host of other sources that took their facts from the local paper.
Narrowboat World wrote, months later:
IT was last year that the front boat of a convoy of five boats broke down in Harecastle Tunnel on the Trent & Mersey Canal, and Staffordshire Fire Service and British Waterways were criticised for standing helplessly by, doing nothing, reports Alan Tilbury.
The fire service did not have the right equipment, and the British Waterways boat that is kept at the entrance, as shown in the photograph, for such an emergency could not be taken in as the broken down boat engine was smoking, and as it was believed there could have been a fire, and the staff were not trained for such an emergency.
All of them, said David, got the story wrong!
What happened was that although the fire brigade arrived quickly, they spend so long going through their preparatory checklist (up to 20 minutes), that in the meantime it became evident the broken-down boat was slowly edging to the exit anyway, being pushed by another boat behind it at a snail's pace.
David said the boat was within a couple of hundred yards of the tunnel portal by the time the fire brigade were ready.
"I said to them: 'Don't bother, they look like they are coming out anyway'", he told me.
"I never said they shouldn't go in. I just said they didn't need to go in - the boat was on its way out!"
For three years he's been burning at being misrepresented by the local rag and by Narrowboat World.
Unfortunately the two stories I linked to on the Sentinel website have disappeared, as has the original Narrowboat World report.
However, Granny is still No. 1 on Google for 'harecastle tunnel breakdown':
No wonder Dave Fern has burned with indignation these last three years, and no wonder he sought me out.
Many boats coming out of Harecastle tunnel looks like they are on fire. There must be a lot of false alarms. For example this cruiser in September 2007, smoking like a gauloise:
On zooming in to this picture I was tickled to see the steerer looking like he was gagging from the smoke:
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