English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

10:00 PM

We build dikes to resist storms that occur once every 10,00 years, or once every 100,000 years, etc.

It's all statistics.

You can build a dike wide and tall enough to withstand any hurricane.

Robusto

So ... never. You never had a Category 5 hurricane in your country. And likely never will. Not even in 10,000 years.

Xanne

Also the Seattle area is subject to major flooding from a tsunami. Seattle and north toward Vancouver. I figured some time ago we’ll lose Miami. Time for geoengineering?

Cerberus

Maybe in a million years, we will.

Robusto

In a million years you'll have had several ice ages, most likely.

Cerberus

That is the time scale one uses for dikes.

I assure you, a level-5 hurricane cannot breach a dike that is wide and high enough.

Maybe the cost would be prohibitive even for a rich place like America, to build a dike high enough to resist 100-metre-high tsunamis around the entire coastline.

Xanne

10:03 PM

Oh, the faith!

Cerberus

But that's not what we are talking about here.

Robusto

@Cerberus Putting hurricane-proof dikes around Florida is a pipe dream, nothing more.

Cerberus

How do you know?

At any rate, just begin with the cities.

Robusto

@Cerberus How do you know it's not?

Cerberus

I'm 100% confident that you can build dikes around those.

@Robusto Because I know a little bit about dikes and coastal defence.

Robusto

10:05 PM

> A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Xanne

How about moving some of the water to the Aral Sea? Also I sort of like turning the Central Valley into a freshwater lake.

That’s a good infrastructure project for a Biden admin.

Robusto

By the way, there are already dikes in Florida. Apparently they're not doing so well.

Xanne

Can’t be much harder than the Hoover Dam.

Robusto

> When Hurricane Irma hit two years ago, levels in the 730-square-mile lake — the largest in the Southeast — shot up 3 1/2 feet to 17.2 feet. That level increases regular inspections of the aging Herbert Hoover Dike from weekly to daily. Irma’s initial rainfall wasn’t the real problem, it was all the stormwater runoff flowing down wetlands, canals and the lake’s recharge areas over the following weeks.

In a hurricane you get water from ocean and from sky.

Cerberus

That's why you have pumps and dikes.

> About Katrina in New Orleans: Four major investigations were conducted by civil engineers and other experts in an attempt to identify the underlying reasons for the failure of the federal flood protection system. All concur that the primary cause of the flooding was inadequate design and construction by the Corps of Engineers.

> On August 29, 2005, there were over 50 failures of the levees and flood walls protecting New Orleans, Louisiana, and its suburbs following passage of Hurricane Katrina and landfall in Mississippi. The levee and flood wall failures caused flooding in 80% of New Orleans and all of St. Bernard Parish.

If those had been built better, they could have held.

Now, it may be acceptable risk occasional flooding, say, once in a millennium or one in 100,000 years.

That is a choice.

But New Orleans could have been kept dry if its dikes had been constructed and maintained better.

Xanne

10:16 PM

Meanwhile we should have been better prepared for . . . the corona (as RegDwight calls it), Katrina, meteors, fire in dry forests in CA and CO, etc. etc.

Robusto

I appreciate your optimism, @Cerb, but even if this kind of enterprise were physically possible—and I am not at all certain it is—there remains the bigger battle of whether it is at all politically possible. Look how hard it is to get some people to wear a fucking mask during a pandemic. How do you deal with telling them they can't have their beaches and boats and all that crap?

Cerberus

Yes, that is the real issue.

It is physically possible. Your own government agrees that it is.

But it just didn't build the protection around NO fast enough (it wasn't finished when Katrina struck).

> On August 29, 2005, flood walls and levees catastrophically failed throughout the metro area. Some collapsed well below design thresholds (17th Street and London Canals). Others collapsed after a brief period of overtopping (Industrial Canal) caused scouring or erosion of the earthen levee walls.

> In 1965, Congress authorized the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project (LPVHPP) which reiterated the principle of local participation in federally funded projects. The project was initially estimated to take 13 years, but when Katrina struck in 2005, almost 40 years later, the project was only 60–90% complete with a revised projected completion date of 2015.

So it looks like a combination of poor construction and not being finished in time.

Xanne

Then there’s the Japanese tsunami the overwhelmed a nuclear plant.

So we better fix all of them up.

Mitch

OK screw it, I'm moving to Mars

no problems with water -at all-

no problems with too much water -at all-

Robusto

5 Reasons Going To Mars is a TERRIBLE Idea | Answers With Joe

►

Mitch

10:21 PM

@Robusto Only five?

Robusto

They're deal-breakers.

Mitch

excessive perchlorates only sounds like an opportunity for chemical plants

Robusto

@Mitch How many lives do you have?

Mitch

@Robusto Fine. Send cats.

Win-win

they're probably the real cause of global warming

Cerberus

@Xanne Now, that is a somewhat different problem.

Mitch

10:23 PM

all that purring

Cerberus

The Japanese walls held, but they were too low.

2005 levee failures in Greater New Orleans

On August 29, 2005, there were over 50 failures of the levees and flood walls protecting New Orleans, Louisiana, and its suburbs following passage of Hurricane Katrina and landfall in Mississippi. The levee and flood wall failures caused flooding in 80% of New Orleans and all of St. Bernard Parish. Tens of billions of gallons of water spilled into vast areas of New Orleans, flooding over 100,000 homes and businesses. Responsibility for the design and construction of the levee system belongs to the United States Army Corps of Engineers; the responsibility of maintenance belongs to the local levee...

This article is chock full of engineering failures.

Mitch

cats nowhere to be seen in any of that. pretty obvious they were hiding.

Xanne

Then the Bay Bridge collapsed is the Loma Prieta quake.

No cats were injured.

Cerberus

> The disaster had major implications for a large segment of the population, economy, and politics of the entire United States. It has prompted a Congressional review of the Army Corps of Engineers and the failure of portions of the federally built flood protection system which experts agree should have protected the city's inhabitants from Katrina's surge.

The city could have been protected.

"Nothing could protect against surges caused by a level-5 hurricane" is just plain untrue.

I really, truly do not get why people perpetuate this myth.

Is it an excuse by Republicans to prevent the government from doing what needs to be done?

Xanne

@Cerberus ‘Most anything could have been prevented, protected, ameliorated. If only we had known . . .

@Cerberus You should check out the yeats when the Democrats have been in control of the US Congress, which appropriates the funds.

Cerberus

10:31 PM

@Xanne Had known what? If the 1965 plan had been carried out properly and in time, that would most probably have been enough. They knew.

Xanne

The immediate, politically salient demands are for almost entirely for current expenditures on health, retirement, welfare, education.

Cerberus

@Xanne The yeats?

Seats?

Robusto

@Cerberus She meant to type "years" ...

Cerberus

@Xanne Right, it requires some long-term planning.

@Robusto Ahh.

So the problem can be political or organisational; but it is physically and technically possible.

Which I think was Rob's second point.

Robusto

I suppose it's possible she was referring to Yeats's poem "The Second Coming."

Cerberus

10:34 PM

So, to come back to Bangladesh: if they get enough help, they can at the very least protect their cities.

With a little more effort and money, probably also most of their agricultural land.

Oh, and time.

They need time.

Xanne

@Cerberus I imagine the US executive branch has plans for almost everything. But yes, seats/majority, because Congress appropriates the funds. However the political pressures are on both parties.

Cerberus

Right.

Xanne

There were some advance warnings on Vesuvius, too.

2

Cerberus

Once the perceived urgency increases, I'm sure more means will be allocated.

Hah, but the Roman government was nowhere as well organised as modern governments are.

And they didn't have anything like our knowledge.

Robusto

@Cerberus I would not describe modern governments as "organized"—at least none that I've seen.

Cerberus

10:38 PM

Much more than than the Roman government.

Xanne

The Romans did some good work with water, though.

Cerberus

Certainly, for their time.

But nothing like your government.

> Scientific American asked a wide range of experts to present solutions for the region. Three strategies emerged: a tight ring around the New Orleans metropolitan area alone; a comprehensive, 440-mile levee system that would snake from the Mississippi border halfway to Texas but lie only partway to the shoreline, leaving the coast for lost; and an outer shield around the region’s perimeter, such as the one in the Netherlands, which would spare every locale.

Robusto

@Xanne You mean the aqueducts? Very true. And Rome didn't cease being Rome until the barbarian hordes tore a bunch down, and others fell into disuse because the Roman infrastructure detiorated.

Xanne

@Mitch The Hawaiian Islands are still increasing in size, I think. Continual eruptions are a tourist attraction. May be better than Mars.

Robusto

But without the aqueducts, Rome would never have been able to support a population of a million people.

Cerberus

10:45 PM

But various aqueducts remained in use.

Mitch

@Xanne whew

Cerberus

> In all, federal, state and local governments spent more than $20 billion on the 350 miles of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps that now encircle greater New Orleans [after Katrina].

> The problem, in the argot of flood protection, is that the Army Corps of Engineers designed the new system to protect against the storms that would cause a “100-year” flood — a flood with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year.

So they should have spent still more.

Xanne

@Mitch May be the hot real estate market for the late 21st.

Cerberus

The estimated GDP of New Orleans is $80 billion.

Xanne

Preparing to fight the last war.

Cerberus

10:50 PM

Perhaps, if they had spent $10 billion more, they could have increased protections to withstand storms that come once in 10,000 or 100,000 years.

It should be worth while, consider the 125$ billion in just financial damage Katrina alone caused.

But the city was flooded several times during the past 100 years.

Now, nothing is perfect, and mistakes happen.

Xanne

Oh, that will be a great platform for the next election.

Cerberus

The increased urgency did make them spend 20 billion in a fairly short time. So it helped...

Robusto

@Cerberus So if it cost $20 billion for 350 miles of substandard protection, what would the price be for over 10 times that distance of killer hurricane-proof protection?

Cerberus

@Robusto Less than 10x as much, probably; cities require special constructions, think only of the rivers.

But, yes, it is a lot of money.

But $200 billion is affordable for a US state, when spread out over twenty years.

Once it's all in place, maintenance is much less expensive.

Robusto

But the coastline is not all seamless seashore from Presque Isle, Maine to Brownsville, Texas. There are innumerable islands and jetties and keys, and river deltas and on and on and on.

Mitch

10:56 PM

@Xanne You make a good case. But prices there are so high!

Xanne

@Mitch The operative word is there. To avoid situations when there’s no there there.

Mitch

@Xanne I just read an article today that the Armenian-Azerbaijan war (which lasted like a couple months and just ended) should scare the crap out of the Western European armies, because they are not prepared to deal with how well the Azeri's won (@M.A.R.)

Not to take the discussion away from cats or anything

@Robusto RIght. The barrier Islands don't seem to take care of the problem.

@Xanne haha no that was what Gertrude Stein said about the LA suburbs.

I'm sure Hawaii isn't -that- bad

Xanne

@Mitch I thought it was Oakland.

Actually if you want to do disasters, there’s always the electric grid.

Mitch

11:12 PM

@Xanne haha...close? by 500 miles? I'd still get reasonable points on geoguessr

@Xanne after the east coast blackouts in the 60's, didn't 'they' sorta try to figure out a way to prevent failover problems?

Xanne

@Mitch Here in northern California we have rolling blackouts in response to high wind to prevent sparks from the electric wires from lighting fires. That is a sad state of technology. And hardly cost-free given the content of freezers and refrigerators.

I don’t know about whether the overall grid is in better shape, but the current threat is cyber attack, supposedly.

Cerberus

11:37 PM

@Robusto Yes, so most likely there will be parts that require no dikes, or simpler protections.

And praesumably some areas will be allowed to flood.

@Mitch Do you still play?

Last time I tried, I couldn't get it to work as normal without some paid account or something.

Mitch

@Cerberus every so often I'll visit, but yeah they've added stuff so that you have to pay for anything interesting. Also, on youtube I ran across some guy who records his plays where he tries to get as close to perfect as possible with different limitations, like getting within meters of the original, or allowing no movement at all just rotating in place.

Cerberus

@Mitch How about no Googling?

I never Google, or it gets too easy.

Mitch

Oh I think that guy did it all without googling.

I have the most fun by googling to get within meters.

Cerberus

OK.

But rotating without Googling, how can you possibly get anywhere close?

Mitch

you find a sign so then you know the country, or you find a route number and that can really pin it down.

@Cerberus vegetation, style of street markings, things like that