LONDON — After days of heavy rain, a dam containing 1.3m tonnes of water from the Toddbrook Reservoir suffered major damage — possibly leading to a complete collapse. Thousands of people have evacuated nearby Whaley Bridge and 10 other towns in the High Peak area of Derbyshire, 20 miles southeast of Manchester.
The threat to workers and farmers in the area shines a spotlight on the U.K.’s infrastructure crisis and the rulers’ profit-driven contempt for working people, whose lives, homes and livelihoods are at stake.
Local residents have reported cracks in the spillway and vegetation protruding through. “We have been telling them for years that the spillway has been clogging up with plants, trees and weeds,” Duncan Fife, who lives by the reservoir, told BBC News. “Why don’t they maintain it?”
“Visits to the area by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn will solve nothing” said Hugo Wils, a member of the Communist League in Manchester. “What’s needed is a crash program of government-funded public works to build the infrastructure we need. Workers and our unions must fight for workers control over production to protect those on the job and in the nearby communities.”