Visited by Woodburner and aem with honorary mention to Ojay, without whose information we would never have done this place.
Bunker is a fairly modern (mid 80's) concrete storm relief drain on the edge of Warrington, it snakes its way for nearly 3 miles through the suburbs before finally dumping its load into the canal.
Bunker is a fairly modern (mid 80's) concrete storm relief drain on the edge of Warrington, it snakes its way for nearly 3 miles through the suburbs before finally dumping its load into the canal.
The construction is varying size of RCP from 5ft upto 8ft near the outfall. There are lots of cool features along the way, including stair chambers, big ass multistorey inspection chamers, the 'big steps', the 'swirl chamber' (which kicks ass) and the 'RAEL' chamber named after the graff thats been in there for years.
Anyway, on with the story...
We dropped into the system at a mid point and decided to head upstream to check out the big steps and swirl chamber first. We only got our camera gear out once we had walked (and climbed) all the way upto the swirl chamber, so the photos are in order from upstream end towards the outfall...
Big HOLEZ!!
Plughole anus
Lighting Bitch WIN!
One of the many Looooong boring tunnels.
Big ass chamber.
Emo in drainz.
The big steps.
A 5ft RCP that I couldn't be arsed to go down.
Looking down the big steps.
Another chamber which smells vaguely of 'fresh' but no brown trout in sight!
Bit late for that...
One of the smaller staircase chambers.
RAEL chamber.
From the RAEL chamber we headed down the 8ft pipe to the end of the drain, we were buggered by this time after 4 hours underground but thought we should have a look for completeness.
It started off looking like this, and was actually tall enough to walk on the raised section.
Then it changed to this sort of arrangement with a huge steel pipe running alongside the drain.
Finally we arrived here and the water level was too much for our wellies, the end of our trip here...
However bunker had a surprise for us here... aem had set up for a couple of shots down the deep water bit when he said 'The waters dropped' and sure enough it had, at least 8-10 inches lower than it was previously, this spooked us a little but then the water level returned to its previous level within a matter of seconds...
This happened 2 or 3 more times, but on the final time the water level came up quite a bit higher than before, at that point we made the executive decision to GTFO.
I'm intregued as to why this happened? the flow of water from the upstream end never changed at all so that didn't cause the level change... Is the outfall chamber pumped into the river at all? I'd be interested to know if any local peeps or l33t drain0rs know the answer.
Cheers,
WB.
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