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Super Engineers...

King of the Americas

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...so it would seem that the disaster relief workers, and especially the emergency response teams didn't watch a lot of movies to prepair for this disaster...

I mean Tommy Lee Jones stopped a flow of lava by having a building demolished fall into its path!!!

We had a solid Catagory 4 Huricane headed for New Orleans. We KNEW (although the President did not) that the levees there could only stand up to a Catagory 3, without suffering massive failure.

So, where were the Super Smart, Ultra-Equiped, Emergency Engineers to come in fix the broken levees and save the day???

Sadly, they're only in the movies. There ARE no superheros, or heavy disaster handlers on the horizon headed this way...

But shouldn't there be!?!?

After 9-11, and given the nature of the world we live in, shouldn't we at least give some thought to the notion that, some disaster cases call for much bigger guns, or at least leaders willing and able to think 'ahead' of the curve!!!???!!!???

First, there appears to have been little preparation for the rapid repair of the levees. Several technologies exist for creating or repairing dikes on the fly. For example, oil companies use a type of hollow cement barge that can be floated into place and then sunk. They use them to create islands in swampy areas on which to place drilling equipment. They can also be used to create or repair broken levees. Why wasn't such equipment pre-positioned on Lake Pontchartrain on barges so that it could be rushed to the levee breaks? By comparison, dropping sand bags from helicopters seems rather ad hoc, to say the VERY least.

An even worse oversight, however, seems to be the pumps that must function even in ordinary circumstances in order to keep the city dry. New Orleans sits below all the surrounding water and has absolutely no natural drainage at all. Without the pumps, even normal rainfall will flood the city. Yet the pumps all seem to have worked off the regular electrical grid with little or no local backup power. Once Katrina and the flooding knocked the power grid offline, the pumps went down. Even after they repaired the levees, without the pumps the water will just sit inside the city. The pumping system should have had backup power. Probably the best system would have been to run them off natural gas and to have created storage tanks near the pumps in case the gas lines failed.

I think the people of New Orleans and Louisiana need to ask hard questions about the level of technological preparations. It looks to me that more aggressive planning could have prevented the worst of the flooding.
 
You intend to pre-position a barge in the path of a Category 4 hurricane? No problem. But where it is positioned after the storm passes is another thing entirely. :p


eta:
Before work can even begin on the Industrial canal two barges pushed onto a bridge by Katrina and a sunken barge need to be removed. The Coast Guard has said 110 barges, ships and boats sank or ran aground during the storm -- 67 of them in the Mississippi River, and another 43 along the coast.
Click to expand...
 
To Wildcat:

I'll conceed that point, but would further propose that 'little to nothing' was done or thought about in regards to the levees breaking and repairing them quickly...

I mean how much easier would the rescue efforts have been, in a 'drier' New Orleans???

Having the pumps be semi-water proof and ran independent of the electrical grid seems like the FIRST item of business, when discussing New Orleans below sea level existance and their handling a flood.

Dropping a few sandbags into a massive breach of a levee, didn't and wouldn't have impeeded the flow of water into the city. As I watched I couldn't help but think about how to clog a drain. You want to slog a drain fast, START by placing a screen over the hole...then you can toss in a little hairand before you know it, no more water is flowing out of the tub.

I am watching them drop sand bags into the breach and I am thinking, what is stopping those bags from being washed out of the way? Where is the screen to hold the clogging agent?? Why not have the copters drop something big enough to cover the breach, but yet let water through, THEN begin dropping in your beaver fodder.

Rather than saving the city, they focused their efforts on saving individuals from roof tops, which is fine and makes for great TV, but I can't help but wish and want for a group of people who could manage the big picture...

Think of the time, energy, property and resources that could have been saved if the levees (which we KNEW would break) could have been repaired. It was as if we were ONLY concerned with treating the symptoms rather than the illness itself.
 
WildCat said:
You intend to pre-position a barge in the path of a Category 4 hurricane? No problem. But where it is positioned after the storm passes is another thing entirely. :p
Click to expand...
That does leap to mind, doesn't it? All the same, the basic point remains : why so little apparent preparation? Reaction seems to have been ad hoc.
 
A few hundred hydrogen bombs should do the trick...


...if we wanted to make the hurricane winds radioactive...
 
My BIGGEST complaint...

...was that we seemed powerless to affect change to the 'big picture'. Indeed we could rescue 'individuals' from rooftops, only to deliver them to an under-supplied waiting station.

I know that we don't live in a world of superhero, so I didn't expect Superman himself to show up and freeze the lake with a quick huff & puff.

However, I DID expect that 'someone' somewhere had a group of guys brainstorming on how to repair a broken levee(s), so as to fix the underlying illness causing the horrible symptoms.

Dropping really BIG sandbags into the breach just didn't cut it.

---

"Mr. President, the levees have been breached and New Orleans is flooding as we speak. Should we give the Dutch a call, and ask how quickly repair levees & dykes?"

Over a WEEK goes by and the levees are still not repaired.

What gives? No one is the WORLD had the ability and know how to make those repairs!?!?

EVEN given that they KNEW this would happen!!!???!!!???

Where are all the supermen, the super-thinkers, the doers of great and awesome deeds, those whom we would call upon to deliver us from catastrophey???
 
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