Volume Five - The Age of Decline & Crass Stupidity - Some fools had cunning plans! . . .

The first cunning plan was to recover the c.2,000 tons of steel from the sunken pontoon by building a dam across the dock 370 feet (112.8m) wide leaving a lagoon at the western end of the dock.

Tipper trucks full of rubble and soil plied multiple journeys in the intervening years between 1966 and 1970. Six or more diesel pumps were brought in to pump the water over the top of the dam into the open dock, which then drained out to sea via the basin. These worked day and night for months.

The Penarth Times [101] recounted in February 2017 'When mining waste was used to fill in 25-acre disused dock', a wholly inaccurate title based on assumptions from an article published 50 years earlier (an edition of February 3rd, 1967) : -

'Tip waste from Welsh valleys may be used to fill in the disused Penarth Dock to pave the way for development of the 25-acre site. Penarth Council this week decided to approach the Welsh Office for a grant under the 1966 Industrial Development Act to enable them to meet the high cost of transporting the waste.'

To my best knowledge and recollection that never happened - it was progressively filled with more readily available local household, together with masses of uncontrolled industrial, waste and that is why it continues belching methane gas and other liquid nasties half a century later!

The 1970 OS map captures the extents of dam across the dock and right, some images from the mid 1970’s with that damn dam! The location of the dam mirrors approximately the extent of the original 1860’s dock prior to it being extended in the 1885.