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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
@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.
> 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.
@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.
> 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.
@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?
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.
@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.
@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 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.