Between the rains

Five days of rain, today and tomorrow dry, then rain again on Tuesday and Wednesday. Unlike last spring, when a drought took hold of central Poland. To Jakubowizna, then, to see how it's looking.

Below: wide-angle view towards Chynów station from Widok. Orchards under water, the road to the station under water.

Below: telephoto view towards Chynów station showing the drainage ditch between the road in the above pic and the railway line. Water flows down from the adjacent fields and into the ditch, then south along the ditch towards Widok. Note the grass further along - without grass roots to anchor the soil, it will merely be washed down into the ditch, soon clogging it up. One way or another, keeping the drainage ditches flowing freely will be full-time work for railway infrastructure operator, PKP PLK S.A.; there is a danger of rainwaters washing away the track's underpinnings.

Below: more wet orchards, this time nearer my działka. The water table, sitting on a bed of impermeable clay, reaches the surface in many lower-lying places.

Below: this dog has decided that it will sit in the middle of the road. Several cars had to make their way around it before it finally decided to go back into its yard. Visual reminder of why one must drive slowly through villages.

Below: view from the street outside my działka looking towards southern Jakubowizna. The road running through is less than 300m away from where I'm standing.

Below: view from that road looking towards my dzialka. The two parallel roads are separated by 300m of fallow land, with a chain-link fence at the southern end, preventing pedestrians from walking through. The alternative is to walk 1.3km past the railway station, or 3.0km the other way, through the wood. The land stands idle; it could at least be used as a path linking the two parts of the village.

Left: having already walked the 1.3km way heading out, I choose the 3.0km detour on the way back. The sandy track that is the road from Machcin II to Jakubowizna is relatively dry as the wood through which it runs is some situated some 12m higher than the railway line.

Below: a taster of yesterday - the fields between the S7 extension and Dawidy Bankowe. I went out for a walk shortly after the funeral of Prince Philip and two-thirds of the way round I was caught out by an intense rainstorm, drenching me to the skin. The dark clouds are behind me; the heavens will open in about ten minutes' time. The fields, sodden by five days of heavy rain, are about to get wetter still.

Update, Monday 19 April 2021. Though today, as forecast, is sunny and dry, Warsaw was visited by an almighty, though localised rainstorm. Rolling thunder and intense rain drumming on the roof merged into one low, loud rumble, so I couldn't pick out the noise of one from the other. I have never experienced this in my life. 

This time three years ago:

Towards a circular economy

This time four years ago:
Ralph Vaughan-Williams - two song cycles

This time 12 years ago:
Spring scenes in Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Modernist wheels

This time 14 years ago:
Mammatus clouds over Jeziorki

Drainage ditches, hunters' 'pulpit' and suburban sprawl

Drainage ditches criss-cross the flat fields of Jeziorki and surrounding villages. I've written about the ditch that serves as Warsaw's southern border, demarcating the line between Jeziorki and Mysiadło. This post will go further west, that same ditch cuts under the railway line, and then under ulica Gogolińska. Again, this is the Warsaw border, Warsaw to the right.

Below: having crossed the tracks, I'm looking the other way, eastwards. I'm still on the Warsaw side.

Having crossed ul. Gogolińska, I leave Warsaw. The drainage ditch now runs south-west, the trees in the picture below run away to the right, and that treeline becomes Warsaw's border. The ditch now leads towards the village of Zgorzała. In the distance (click to enlarge) you should be able to make out a wooden watch tower.

Here it is - looking back down along that ditch, the treeline border of Warsaw to the left in the distance. This tower is an ambona (lit. 'pulpit'), in this context though a hunters' stand. It is from here that hunters can shoot at local game. Deer, hare and pheasant, the occasional wild boar. I must say that I am against the killing of sentient life for sport.

But the wildlife itself is being squeezed out. On the horizon, the unstoppable encroachment of hundreds of houses of Nowa Wola. What was once arable farmland is now filling up rapidly with new estates with twee names like  'Birds of Paradise Estate' or 'Our Little Town Estate' but no amenities.

The other evening, I saw deer in Jeziorki, for the first time ever. These developments, plus work on the S7 extension to the west of here is driving wildlife to the quieter environs across the track.

Having climbed the ladder to see inside, I was surprised that there was no sign of use - no empty shotgun cartridges, nor indeed detritus left by teenagers or the local open-air drinking  community. Maybe hunters - for the damage they wreak on the wildlife - are as ecologically conscientious as I am and take every scrap of litter home with them. Or maybe there's not been any hunting going on for a while here.

Onwards to the end of that drainage ditch, to where it turns south, eventually petering out in a field just north of Nowa Wola. I turn north, however, and head towards Zgorzała, itself spreading out (though here we have individual houses rather than large estates of identical houses).

Onwards, past houses newly finished, unfinished and already inhabited, ones still being finished and a few that look they will never finally be finished - not under the current owners, anyway. I fear the sprawl in the fields south of Warsaw will end up looking like the 1930s sprawl west of London - Greenford, Hayes, Northolt, Ickenham, Ruislip, Hillingdon - never-ending soul-less suburbs moving ever-further from the city centre. At least those 1930s London suburbs had facilities - schools, shops, hospitals, pubs - and above all - good rail links to central London.

This time last year:
Aviation the theme (plane pics are popular!)

This time two years ago:
Five closed-off hectares of central Warsaw

This time three years ago
Progress by the ponds

This time seven years ago:
Kaczyński's ignorance, deceit or folly? 

This time eight years ago:
The British electrical plug reigns supreme

This time nine years ago:
Easter, and the end of Lent

This time ten years ago:
That Icelandic volcano

This time 11 years ago:
Views of Historic Toruń

This time 12 years ago:
One swallow does not a summer make

New to Jeziorki

An ultra-local post of little relevance to anyone living outside of this blessed corner of southern Warsaw. On Monday morning I saw from the train into town some work going on by the tracks between W-wa Jeziorki and W-wa Dawidy. [Incidentally, the two station names were initially going to be the other way round, as Dawidy/Dawidy Bankowe/Dawidy Poduchowne lie west of the tracks, while Jeziorki Północne/Jeziorki Południowe lie east of the tracks spanning both stations. Just a little ultra-local aside]. Anyway, my curiosity was piqued by this, so I decided to get ofp the train at Dawidy today on my way home from work to have a look.

Below: what looks like the bed of a new road leading up to where the work is going on, a permanent piece of infrastructure - but what is it? To the left, a culvert under the tracks, essential for drainage. This has just been cleaned up. When dry, you can walk through, head bowed.

Below: from the top of a heap of soil I grab this shot. But what is it? My first thought was - a bridge support. With another one on the other side of the tracks, is a small viaduct or footbridge being built here, where the old level crossing on ul. Kórnicka once was?

Probably not - this is more to do with drainage and sewerage. The white van to the right of the photo below has written on the side zbiorniki żelbetonowe ('reinforced concrete reservoirs).

This looks to be connected with the railway modernisation project; the land here is owned by PKP rather than by the local authority. We shall see.

Below: a new view on ul. Trombity - the joining of two adjacent plots (I'd been interested in buying the one to the left but it was slightly too expensive and the owner didn't want to budge - since then I've bought a flat in Łódź and a działka near Chynów and still have money left over, so not regretting this). Anyway, the plot on the right was totally overgrown, the owner lived by the sea, I expect that both sides will be developed into something more attractive that will add value to the neighbourhood.

Below: another new view - oilseed rape on ul. Trombity - the land that my bedroom overlooks. This year's cereal crop (wheat) was harvested exceptionally early (late June!) as a result of the sunshine that dominated this spring's weather. As soon as the combine harvester was off the field, it was ploughed and sown, and within weeks the field had turned bright yellow. Today, the rape is being ploughed over as a break crop, bringing plentiful nutrients back into the soil. Professor Tofts puts it like this: "To plough once in the winter/Sowing and again in Lent/Sowing with as many oxen/Sowing with as many oxen/As he shall have yoked in the plough/Oh yeah."

In the meanwhile, work continues apace on the viaduct taking ul. Karczunkowska over the railway line by W-wa Jeziorki station (which Google Maps had rather unhelpfully shown as being 'closed' - I corrected this mistake). More on that project as it moves into the next phase.

This time three years ago:
Hydrology - droughts, floods and sandbanks

This time five years ago:
Radom air show - Part 1

This time six years ago:
Restricting passenger movement and safety

This time seven years ago:
Seasonal fruit - eat it in bulk, while you can!

This time nine years ago:
Russia-Polish 'unification', 1939-style

A long, long wait finally over

Twelve years and one month after moving into our house, we are finally connected to the town drains. Below: I came home last night to find the septic tank with its top off and the outflow pipe from the house connected to the sewer pipe (installed in October) that runs through our estate.

Below: this morning, at 7am the men were busy filling in the septic tank with earth and packing it down with a pneumatic hammer.

I got home from work this evening to find the job (on our house at least) done. Completely and totally. Paving stones neatly So finally, freedom from that septic tank anxiety that mounts as the fortnight wears on - will it spill over before Pan Norbert* turns up to empty it? All that remains to do now is to fit a separate meter for the outdoor taps, to ensure that we're not charged sewerage fees on water that's used in the garden.

It was a great feeling to flush the loo knowing that the wastewater is heading for a water treatment plant via a network of pipes and sewers, rather than being held in a ten-cubic metre tank awaiting a ten-tonne truck to clog up the roads getting to and from our house.

There are EU funds available for filling septic tanks, but the procedure is long and there's no guarantee your application will be successful. Better, then, to bite the bullet, pay for the work, get it done quickly and save on those 230 złoty (£46) septic tank-emptying fees - that's over £90 a month. A big thanks to our neighbour Tomek, who expedited the whole process.

At last, I feel civilised - civilised that is in the sense of being part of the city, the city we pay our taxes in, civilised as in belonging to a city. Now all that's needed is that pavement along ul. Karczunkowska...

* Pan Norbert - not cheap, but very reliable, and always willing to help out in crisis situations.

This time last year:
No more revelations

This time three years ago:
Free will vs. destiny

Pozytywki ponds after the refurbishment

A first post-winter look at the newly-deepened flood retention ponds along ul. Pozytywki. Below: a panoramic shot of the pond on the corner of Pozytywki, Katarynki and Czarkowskiego. This is Jezioro Wąsal; surrounding trees and shrubs have been cut down, the banks re-profiled and a new sluice gate fitted (foreground). At present it looks bare and uninviting; no doubt it will regain some of its semi-rustic charm when grass grows back on the banks. At the far end, a newly-deepened and widened channel linking this pond to the one further up Pozytywki (bottom picture).

Left: Wąsal looking west from ul. Czarkowskiego. The houses fronting onto ul. Pozytywki ('Music-Box Street') have had little wooden platforms built out overlooking the pond. I wonder whether this has been done as part of the refurbishment, or whether the home-owners took the initiative to construct them. It's quarter past seven in the evening, this, the southernmost extreme of Warsaw is silent and still, with just some light traffic noise coming from Puławska behind me.

Incidentally, ul. Katarynki means 'Barrel-Organ Street' or 'Hurdy-Gurdy Street'. From here, right up to ul. Poleczki six kilometres north, most streets that have appeared after 1951 when the area became part of Warsaw, have musically-themed names, with folk instruments and folk dances predominating.

Above: Jezioro Pozytywki, on ul. Pozytywki. Here, the loss of trees is more apparent; the pond has lost much of its charm. [Click on the relevant labels below to see how the area looked before it was revitalised.] Grass will return, but it was all the surrounding greenery that gave the area its now lost appeal. But it's still a pleasant area for an evening's stroll.

This time last year:
May Day in the heat [31C!]

This time two years ago:
Bike ride across rural Poland

This time six years ago:
Mazovian landmark from the air

Draining Jeziorki - then and now

Jeziorki, being as flat as Lincolnshire and of poor soil quality, has been subject to localised flooding whenever the water table has risen above the surface after heavy rains. Crops are vulnerable, and as Warsaw began spreading out into the surrounding fields, with new houses beginning to appear, they too were liable to flooding.

So from the early post-war years, a system of retention ponds (zbiorniki retencyjne) were built, absorbing water fed into them by a network of drainage ditches. The largest the one between ul. Trombity, Kórnicka and Dumki (see map below). This map is from 1993, but the shape of the pond is unchanged from the 1958 map. What happened over the years, what the maps didn't show, was that the pond shrank, as reeds took over and soil washed into its basin from the drainage ditches raised the level of its bottom. And landowners blocked the drainage ditches, into which domestic rubbish was also dumped, leaving  them unfit for purpose and increasing the incidence of local flooding (podtopienie).

Until the major work on the reclaiming the ponds began earlier this autumn, the outline of the pond looked nothing like on this map. Not shown on the map is the drainage ditch that acts as the southern border of Warsaw, running along the dotted black line at the bottom of the map. Let's follow it from west (as it crosses ul. Gogolińska and the Warsaw-Radom railway line) to ul. Puławska.

Above: between the railway line and the old Rampa na kruszywa. The border of the ditch is secured by fascines woven from willow branches. Below: the channel (przepust) under the old trackbed of the Rampa escarpment. Note the dumped household waste; apparently some brudasi still consider this a good place to dispose of their old kitchen furniture. And note the weeds taking hold. If left unchecked, this state of affairs will lead to a blockage of the channel, and the flooding on ul. Gogolińska will get worse.

Walking the length of this ditch, I can imagine the work that went into it, after the war, precious little heavy plant on hand (all was needed for the rebuilding of Warsaw); hard physical labour which had real sense - saving one's neighbours' fields from regular flooding. For many young men across what was then the Warsaw Voivodship (now Mazovian), this would have been their first paid work after six years of war (forced labour or fighting with the underground); the joy of a pay-packet mingled with the fear of new repressions from a new occupant.

Left: the ditch runs on, to the left, Mysiadło, to the right, Warsaw. When work on this drainage system commenced, Warsaw extended south only as far as Służewiec and the horse-racing track. Ursynów was incorporated into the City of Warsaw's boundaries in 1951; this ditch has marked its southern border for the past six decades. An unsung piece of civil engineering gets a long-overdue hat-tip.

Above: a lateral channel ( 52° 6'13.42"N,  21° 0'53.80"E) running into the ditch from ul. Pozytywki. Below: a sluice gate slightly further along.

Below: the ditch reaches ul. Puławska, immediately behind me as I take the photo. Note the metal grating under the footbridge, in front of which lies washed-up vegetation. This needs to be removed periodically if the channel is not to be blocked.

Below: the course of the drainage ditch is marked in blue on this Google Earth image, dated 1 May 2012.

There are many other drainage ditches in Jeziorki. After 60 years, the field drainage system is currently being subject to a massive refurbishment, starting with the main retention ponds. The six-million zloty investment should ensure that for the foreseeable future, we'll not be threatened with flooding.

This time last year:
The Eurocrisis - what would Jesus do?

This time three years ago:
Orders of magnitude

This time three years ago:
Jeziorki in the snow

This time four years ago:
Better news on the commuting front

This time five years ago:
I no longer recognise the land where I was born

Pozytywki pond - deeper, wider, longer

Driving back from the weekly shop at Auchan last Saturday, I noticed work in progress on the pond on ul. Pozytywki, with workmen pumping water out of it. I was without my camera at the time, so a big thanks to near-neighbour Marcin Daniecki for sending me a batch of pics from the works. Marcin also linked me to the official public tender website, which shows that the work to improve the functioning of drainage around this part of southern Jeziorki will happen in lightning tempo. The work here and on nearby Wąsal pond on ul. Katarynki is happening in parallel with the larger-scale re-cultivation of the wetlands between ul. Trombity, Dumki and Kórnicka that I've been covering in past weeks, and is intended to prevent a repeat of the disastrous flooding that we experienced in June 2010.

Above: eight-wheeler dump trucks await the soil, dug out from the bottom of the drained pond. Much of this soil will go to local fields, to raise their level as well as their quality - the mud from the pond is high-quality stuff! Most of the fields around Jeziorki right now can be seen sporting mounds of pond mud, which is being levelled by bulldozers.

Above: tree felling is under way. The area is losing some of its charm. The terms of the public tender are ambiguous: on the one hand, trees and bushes are to be cut down (wycinka drzew i krzewów), on the other hand, as well as serving as retention ponds, they must also serve the landscape and nature, maintaining the diversity of flora and fauna.

Below: according to the terms of the tender, the work has to be completed by 10 December. So Sunday working has been the norm. Today, I observed men with brooms sweeping mud and dust off the road surface on Pozytywki, Karczunkowska and Cymbalistów.

Left: what will remain, once the diggers and cutters have gone? What will be achieved - the security of local homes and fields from future flooding.

The ducks and herons will, I hope, return; a deepened, widened pond should mean more fish. And no doubt before too very long, the bushes and trees will grow back.

All the photos above are by Marcin Daniecki, many thanks once again for sending them to me, Marcin!

Below: the way it was, back in May this year. A lovely place, when the midges are not too troublesome. Balancing the needs of suburban man and nature will always be tricky.

Below: also from May 2012, the view looking west across the pond, from the old sluice gate.