Sluice

Overview

Sluice is the complete operating record of an internal drainage board — the statutory body that keeps a low-lying agricultural district from flooding. Barrow Fen & River Lode IDB keeps 18,400 hectares of drained fen dry: 214 km of maintained watercourse, 9 pumping stations and 47 sluices and penstocks, registered, levelled, rated, consented and enforced in one file.

This is not a flood-map viewer and not a generic asset tracker. It is the board's own record, drawn in the idiom of a Victorian civil-engineering drawing on waxed linen — a pale drafting-linen ground, Prussian-blue ruling-pen ink, hatched section tone instead of flat colour, decimal-aligned tabular levels, and a stamped approval cartouche carrying drawing number, scale and date. One oxide-red is held back for the out-of-standard structure and the overdue notice.

What it holds

• Watercourse register — each main drain by reference, length in km, design capacity in cumecs, bed level in metres AOD and the date it was last surveyed.
• Pumping stations — duty and standby sets, kW rating, run-hours, start and stop levels, last overhaul.
• Sluices and penstocks — structure type, invert level, gate condition grade 1-5, date last operated.
• Maintenance programme — the annual weed-cutting and desilting rounds by reach, with contractor, machine and status.
• Drainage rates and special levies — rateable land by parish, the penny rate, occupiers' rates and the special levy charged to the district councils, with the arithmetic shown rather than asserted.
• Consents — applications to discharge to, culvert or alter a watercourse, each against its cited byelaw and a determination clock.
• Riparian enforcement — notices served on riparian owners for obstructions, with compliance dates.
• Flood risk — pumped-catchment standard of protection, telemetry levels and a board-level flood event log.
• Governance — elected and appointed members, declarations of interest, minutes.
• Ratepayer portal and officer dashboard — the real product behind the record: a ratepayer sees their parish, rateable value, rate demand and its arithmetic, consents applied for and notices served; an officer sees pump run-hours, structures out of standard, programme progress, the consent clock and the flood log.

Who it is for

Drainage boards, flood-risk and land-drainage authorities, river and navigation trusts, water-level management partnerships, and any body that must keep a defensible statutory record of assets, levels, rates and consents and be able to show its working.

Make it yours

Swap the district, the drains and the parishes for your own; change the rating basis, the byelaw numbering and the determination period; re-point the long-section figure at your own levels. The drawing idiom and the arithmetic survive the swap.