Catskills flooding

wrote:
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).

I just finished reading John McPhee's "The Control of Nature" which
recounts (3) amazing stories of man's (apparent) triumph over nature,
including the atchafalaya, cooling lava flows in Iceland, and taming
the San Gabriel's erosion west of LA. Yes, it is a huge scale/scope
effort. So what? Back when men were men, this was the stuff we solved.
Huge, huge cisterns and holding tanks...connected by pipes and pumps.
What's the big problem?

Your pal,

TBone

On 30 Jun 2006 11:11:48 -0700, wrote:


wrote:
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).

I just finished reading John McPhee's "The Control of Nature" which
recounts (3) amazing stories of man's (apparent) triumph over nature,
including the atchafalaya, cooling lava flows in Iceland, and taming
the San Gabriel's erosion west of LA. Yes, it is a huge scale/scope
effort. So what? Back when men were men, this was the stuff we solved.

"We," Kemosabe?

Huge, huge cisterns and holding tanks...connected by pipes and pumps.

Er, no, neither "we" or "they" ever did anything remotely like what you
are apparently suggesting.

What's the big problem?

Well, if Mr. McPhee is willing to pay for and outfit such a scheme, none
at all, I guess. But since I'm fairly sure Mr. Phee isn't a
multi-trillionaire with access to what would amount to nearly unlimited
material and manpower, that's pretty much the end of it. Maybe this
will help you understand it: the pumping capacity of the aforementioned
NO drainage pumps is roughly 40 Olympic swimming pools _a minute_, and
they are basically just moving them over a levy from what is a natural
"catch basin." And in the scheme of things, that really isn't all that
much water or a large area. Might the economics of such a thing make it
practical someday? Who can say. What I can say is that today, it just
isn't practical.

TC,
R

Your pal,

TBone

wrote:

I just finished reading John McPhee's "The Control of Nature" which
recounts (3) amazing stories of man's (apparent) triumph over nature,
including the atchafalaya, cooling lava flows in Iceland, and taming
the San Gabriel's erosion west of LA. Yes, it is a huge scale/scope
effort. So what? Back when men were men, this was the stuff we solved.
Huge, huge cisterns and holding tanks...connected by pipes and pumps.
What's the big problem?

The problem? What's the PROBLEM?!

****, we can't even fix Baghdad's water system with billions of dollars.

The only way I could see your idea getting through Congress and the
President is if we gave a no-bid, cost-plus contract to Halliburton.

--
Cut "to the chase" for my email address.

Scott Seidman wrote:
.......
A gas station off Route 17 in Roscoe, in Sullivan County, N.Y, was
swamped by water Wednesday from the flooded Beaver Kill.


There was an aerial photo of it in the NYT. I've stopped there, and
I had a hard time imagining that much water coming up so high.

This was in a story in the NYT as well: ".... and parts of
[Wilkes-Barre]
were still so wet that striped bass were seen swimming on the
streets."
Is that for real ? Are they resident in the Susquehanna year-round ?