Workers bought sugar from supermarket to slow cement flood on Victoria Line | Hacker News Reader

Workers bought sugar from supermarket to slow cement flood on Victoria Line

standard.co.uk

64 pointsraphar39 comments

Apparently sugar in cement is a thing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sugar+concrete

Sugar retards the setting process. Of course people who work with concrete would know this.

I think we've just been given a glimpse into the lore and practices of a foreign profession.

I remember my dad telling me about working on a site where the homeowners had decided they wanted a brown concrete driveway to match the house - and subsequently used a large amount of brown sugar to colourise their cement. It never set.

I like to think that was discovered when somebody was eating a cake or something next to cement mixer.

I took the tube instead of cycling that day and was kicking myself because I so rarely take the tube. When I saw the pictures I thought 10 to 1 they don't have it open by morning, but they did. They deserve credit for getting it cleaned up (or at least operational) in < 14 hours.

For those like myself wondering why sugar was used and how it helped this situation then I found this URL most enlightening:-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10594718/Why...

"Concrete is made using cement, which is a combination of crushed and heated limestone, clay and gypsum; aggregate, such as gravel and sand; and water. Adding water causes a chemical reaction called hydration, where hydrogen from the water combines with calcium, sulphate, aluminium and silicon from the cement. This releases heat and depending on the proportions of each of these minerals, which hydrate at different rates, can set at varying speeds. Sugar, however, is composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen atoms which can interfere with the hydration process by binding with the minerals and slow down the reaction."

The best bit of this is that the story of the cement flood was broken by viral clickbait site UsVsTh3m (a commercial thing from the people who run b3ta). They actually scooped everyone, and everyone used their photos.

http://usvsth3m.com/post/74285062011/you-wont-believe-why-th...

(My loved one used to work for the Tube. She says those photos would have been the actual incident report photos.)

That is pretty intense. I am not sure how you would know that your forms were going to leak that badly, but if you're pumping concrete from the street above its going to be under a lot of pressure when it gets down to the bottom.

If they hadn't caught it (and I assume it was actually a flood alarm that went off in the cabinet) you would have been faced with carving the equipment out of a solid block of concrete and that would have been bloody expensive and slow.

"TfL today came under fire for initially informing commuters the line closure was due to “flooding”"

Technically they weren't lying, they just didn't say what material was doing the flooding.

"That is partly the truth, which is the same as a lie by omission." - Jean Luc Picard

> The only word for it is a f∗∗∗ up of major proportions. Everyone was f-ing and blinding when they realised what had happened.

It's certainly more fuck up than farce, but what does what does "f-ing" and "blinding" mean? (Australian here)

But the key issue - in everything - is not whether you make mistakes, but whether you fix them. This one was fixed.

"f-ing" and "blinding" means cursing and swearing. The "f" being obvious and "blinding" is a substitute for "bloody".

Actually I believe "blinding" is for "blimey", a (rather dated) contraction of "blind me." If that seems a little odd then you have to recall that blasphemy was once stronger than biological cussing. I'm told that the reason for some of the stranger grammatical usage of "fuck" in swearing is down to its substitution for religious words (e.g. "fuck you" for "damn you.")

The chapter on swearing in Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue" is interesting and very amusing.

"Blimey" does seem more likely. The urban dictionary has it as a contraction of "God blind me", which is presumably what you meant by your reference to blasphemy.

Hence "cor blimey"

There's also Stephen Burgen's Your Mother's Tongue, which is a whole book dedicated to European invective (in different languages). It's fun to see how the history of each culture shapes how people swear. For Edam example, it's much more common in Catholic countries to swear by blaspheming in a very strong and direct way.

Exactly what part of Australia do you live in? F-ing is a very common phrase here.

Is "everyone was f-ing" a very common phrase for swearing, or for engaging in intercourse? I assume hyp0 was asking about the unfamiliar regional idiom and has heard the phrase "f-ing" before. He's been on the internet for more than a day after all.

You're missing the point. I'm also an Australian, I'm curious which parts of Australia don't know this.

'Fucking' is, but softening it to 'effing' isn't, and 'blinding' is archaic, mostly used as an intensifying word rather than on it's own ('he was in a blinding hurry'). More likely to use 'bloody'.

I hear it all the time. I live in Sydney.

Weird, I've never really heard it except in the context of someone trying to sanitise their language, such as when kids are around.

Then again, there are some weird regionalisms out there. I once met a pair of sandgropers that said "type of" where other people would say "sort of". They were siblings, so it may have even been family-specific. Haven't heard it elsewhere.

I was just interested. But there you go, regional dialects. I have no idea what a "sand groper" is!

A sand groper is a small insect: <p> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandgroper_%28insect%29 <p> A "sand groper" is also slang for a Western Australian. As a "sand groper", I have never heard anyone use "type of" instead of "sort of" so I'm going to guess it was family specific.

I know what a sand grower is, just never heard the slang :-)

Not sure if the mistake on the writer part or but f-ing and blinding is commonly written as effing and blinding.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/effing+and+blinding

Apparently the link states (British & Australian informal).

Added: if you search for "f-ing and blinding" in Google you'll get did you mean effing and blinding?

I'd imagine this works similarly to how a slice of bread in a bag of cookies keeps the cookies chewy, as the sugar attracts and holds the water from the bread, and keeps the cookies from drying out. Something to do with sugar being hygroscopic.

And now I know how to keep my cookies chewy, thank you jspiros.

What technology are they using for signaling? From the photos, it looks like a bunch of relays connected with a bunch of red wires, but it must be more advanced than that.

Indeed it is - the Victoria Line uses ATO (automatic train operation), so nearly all of the train operation is automated. The system has been running since the 60s, you can read more about it here:

http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/Victoria%20Line%20ATO.htm

London Underground use a number of signalling systems, here's a good resource to get started learning about them: http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/signalling.htm However, ultimately you could develop a super intelligent system using networked PLCs, but at the end of the day you're still going to need relays to actually switch the power to the coloured light signals. The red wires in the photos will lead to a controller somewhere that triggers the relays to switch the mains power on/off to the signals.

"It's stupid more than anything. I guess stupidity has ruled the day here."

Gotta love people weighing in with their expert opinion.

Luckily it wasn't racks of digital gear with fans.

I can imagine someone thinking they had underestimated the quantity of cement needed as it drained into this room.

Wow, I had Ghostery paused and this web site loaded over 50 resources that would otherwise be blocked.

109 JS files clocking over 3MB.

I don't understand Mike White's and Boris Watch's jokes.

London Underground lines have names. One of them is the Circle line. They are shown on the map in colours.

"Blue circle" is a brand of cement.

It's a week joke kludging these things together.

would have loved to be in the room when they realized what had happened

That's enough humans. Robots! come over.

The real question is how they just went pouring cement there without regards for what was in there.

They were pumping it into an escalator void and apparently it burst through into the room.

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