What do you call the place that terminates a water channel, as in the image below?
The channel terminates at the concrete wall. What is the name of that? Channel terminator? Channel barrier?
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2I think that the water channel does not terminate, it goes underground.– GioCommented Mar 1, 2023 at 22:00
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1Nothing "terminates" a water channel. You mean: where it ends. It can end in many places, even in a river or lake.– LambieCommented Mar 1, 2023 at 22:16
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A flood waiting to happen?– Tinfoil HatCommented Mar 4, 2023 at 4:04
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2 Answers
That structure is a dam, defined by MW as:
a barrier preventing the flow of water or of loose solid materials (such as soil or snow)
As the definition implies, this term applies, not only to (say) large hydroelectric dams or ones holding back a major river, but also to much smaller structures like the one in your photo.
Not a terribly common thing to see, but they do have a name - plug dam.
Plugs may be dead ends, or they may separate salt water from brackish water to mediate old drainage canal intrusion problems.
East Cape canal plug dam kayakfari Everglades Canoe prairie trail
See also here - https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2022/03/plugging-cape-sable-everglades-national-park
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The sentence you cite from kayakfari doesn't make any grammatical sense, and the second link doesn't include the phrase "plug dam."– alphabetCommented Mar 2, 2023 at 0:15
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It's the image title - so it's headlinese. These are plug dams. It is the correct term of art in the engineering trade and it is what ordinary folk who live near them call them. I walked across one every day for three years to get to work. Commented Mar 2, 2023 at 0:27
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@alphabet - Search "fuse plug dam" to get an idea of what's going on here (just "plug dam" will return a bunch of bowling balls...Amazon, etc.). Commented Mar 8, 2023 at 5:41