On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 10:59:09 -0400, daytripper
wrote:

On 30 Jun 2006 07:09:23 -0700, wrote:


Tom Littleton wrote:
wrote in message
This is a major bummer. My heart and best wishes go out to anyone
affected by this disaster. I am, however, convinced that these events
are simple plumbing problems that could be solved if we wanted to.
There's always too much water in some places and not enough water in
others. The farmers in about 25 counties east of here could sure use
some of that water. We need a CCC, a real leader, to establish
irrigation and flood control that works.

TBone


woo-hoo!!! I haven't thought about your transcontinental
piping and pumping system idea for a while!!

Still seems pretty fundamental and doable to me.

Uh huh.

You have a plan to move tens of *trillions* of cubic feet of rainfall out of a
roughly 150,000 square mile area comprised of hundreds of watersheds *before*
it all translates into the widespread flooding that we've been seeing?

/daytripper (I think Tom has the right approach on your solution ;-)

Tim, I don't really recall any of the details of your plan (and frankly,
no, I don't want you to help me do so) or even if you were/are serious,
but there is no practical way to stop or redirect things like what the
US Northeast is experiencing (or what the Gulf Coast went through with
the storms). It isn't just the gathering of such vast quantities of
water (alone impossible from a practical standpoint), it's the
processing/treatment/filtering (I can't imagine, given today's rules and
regs, a system that would allow water from such a situation to be
transported completely unprocessed but IAC, again impossible from a
practical standpoint), the transport system (at least _possible_, and
even perhaps a chance that it might, given several decades, amortize as
to be economically prudent, but requiring multiple decades to complete).
The fact of the matter is that man can't practically control nature to
that extent. If one chooses to live where floods are probable,
surprise, surprise - one runs the risk of a flood, and if one chooses to
live in an arid area, one shouldn't be all that surprised when it's dry.

To give you an idea of the scale of what you're talking about, when
everything is working and online, New Orleans (the city itself, not
Orleans parish or the surrounding parishes) has (and had pre-Katrina)
about 150 pumps that can pump something like 25 billion gallons a day
(close to 20 million gals a minute), and major rainfalls can strain
them. Back about 10 years ago, when the capacity was about 75% of the
above, a major rainfall flooded quite a bit of the city (not even close
to the levels of Katrina, but not just a few puddles, either) because
the pumping stations were overwhelmed. And that's a system where,
essentially, you're pumping out a bowl into adjacent waterways.
Forgetting required head pressures, friction calculations, etc., etc.,
etc., the size of the pipe required to move this amount, dead level and
in some miracle frictionless pipe, would be something like a couple of
hundred feet in diameter (_VERY_ roughly calculated based on 4" carrying
800 GPM and roughly guessing at the exponential increase in carrying
capacity as diameter increases - IAC, it'd be one big friggin' pipe).

TC,
R