A practical guide for property owners on narrow waterways, because Form CW-114(b) was not designed with this in mind.

The Canal and River Trust’s Form CW-114(b), titled ‘Report of Obstruction or Unusual Debris in Managed Waterway,’ has thirty-seven fields. Field 22 asks you to estimate the obstruction’s length in meters. Field 23 asks whether the obstruction is biological or non-biological in origin. There is no Field 23(a) for when the answer is ‘unclear, but it appears to be breathing.’ Six residents along a 400-meter stretch of the Dalloway Cut in rural Pendleton Basin have now confirmed displacement events in that canal — meaning something is sitting in approximately nine feet of water and pushing it somewhere it was not going before. The canal is eleven feet wide. Whatever is in it is not a barge. There are no barges.

The first thing you should do, if you are one of these residents or someone in an analogous situation, is document the waterline. Not the thing — the waterline. This is practical for two reasons. One: it gives you a baseline to track if the situation changes. Two: most people who attempt to photograph the thing directly end up with photographs of water, because the thing is not interested in being photographed from the bank at six in the morning, which is a behavioral data point worth having. Eleanor Voss, who owns the property at the southern end of the affected stretch and who I spoke to for forty minutes in her kitchen while she made coffee for both of us without asking if I wanted any, told me she has taken the waterline photograph every morning for eleven days. She showed me the folder on her phone. It is organized by date. The waterline has risen one and a half inches since day one.

Community Notice

I called the Trust. They sent me a PDF. The PDF had a link to another PDF. That one had a phone number. The phone number was for a different department. I stopped at four PDFs because I had things to do.

— Eleanor Voss, Dalloway Cut property owner, 11 days into the situation

The second thing you should do is contact your neighbors before you contact any agency, because agencies will ask whether others have reported it and ‘yes, six of us have been watching it for nearly two weeks’ is a more useful sentence than ‘I think I saw something.’ The six witnesses along the Dalloway Cut have a group chat now. They share waterline photographs. Two of them have started leaving small amounts of food — separately, independently, without discussing it with the others — at the water’s edge near the area of greatest displacement. I am not recommending this. I am noting that it is happening and that so far nothing has taken the food, which is its own kind of information.

Third: file the CW-114(b) anyway. Fill out what you can. In the fields that don’t apply, write ‘see attached.’ Attach photographs of the waterline. Attach a hand-drawn map of the displacement area if you have one — Eleanor has one, done in blue ballpoint on graph paper, and it is clearer than anything the Trust’s own documentation asks for. The form will go somewhere. Someone will read it or it will sit in a queue. Either way, you have a timestamp, and timestamps matter more than most people think they do until they need one. I have a copy of Eleanor’s completed form. I also have a copy of her graph paper map. I asked if I could keep it and she said yes and made me a second coffee.