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| You don't expect this in the good ole USA... |
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Water shortage is real for some folks...
November 1, The Associated Press – (Tennessee) Tennessee town runs out of water insoutheast drought. This summer, the small town of Orme, Tennessee ran out of water. To provide the residents with water until wetter weather arrives, the volunteer fire chief drives the fire truck to an Alabama fire hydrant where he meets another truck from New Hope, Alabama. The two trucks make about a dozen runs, hauling around 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant to Orme’s tank. Water is released from this tank between 6 and 9 p.m. every evening. The town has received a $377,590 emergency grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that the town’s mayor hopes will be Orme’s salvation. A utility crew is laying a 2 1/2-mile pipe to connect Orme to the Bridgeport, Alabama water supply. The work could be finished by Thanksgiving. Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,307437,00.html |
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| To add a comment to "You don't expect this in the good ole USA..." |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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| You don't know how lucky you are until you don't have something you need to survive. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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| Hey Wyatt, that is a great idea...which probably means it won't happen...ever think of running for office? |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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A problem with Wyatts plan is that none of the water in the flooded areas is drinkable. Which means it would first have to be pumped to a water treatment plant and processed, which would delay its deployement. Also the sea water that you propose dumping into the Southwest would require massive desalination plants. Also a disruption of the ecology of the desert could have unforseen circumstances on the environment in the western region of the US. I think it is far better to teach people to conserve their water and respect their environment than it is to have them invest billions so they can continue to not be mindful of their resources. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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This past weekend I drove down to Florida through Georgia and then back up through Alabama. There is water in some lakes and ponds but I saw several ponds in Alabama where there was no water at all and the lake looked like it should have had about 14 feet of water in it.
In defense of Wyatts idea, Check out this blog. It includes photos from a flood control project in Japan. I saw the project on the History Channel's modern marvels but can't find it on their web site. The scale of the project is enormous.
In many cases there simply isn't enough storage for all the water that is involved in a flood. For example, during the 1993 Midwest flood's here in St Louis, the additional water (over normal river levels) was sufficient to cover the entire stet of Rhode Island several feet deep.
We really need to work on conservation and learn how to be better stewards over this planet. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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| ...sometimes I wonder where US innovation has gone... |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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We have to re-invent it voice. We really don't know how well we've got it. I mean: we have enough water to waste, we can keep green lawns in the desert! |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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i think you'll find that the capability of treatment plants to handle incoming water is very limited. most plants are designed to the local conditions (ie removal of lime is not an issue in parts of the country with natural soft water and desalination is an issue for localities on the Gulf coast but not the Great Lakes). They can also only handle so much water per day. Floods are more massive than imaginable. A few facts:
The Alaska pipeline is 800 miles long and at 48 inches in diameter will hold about 53.1 million cubic feet of liquid. The total storage capacity of the pipeline system at the various ports is 9.1 million for a total capacity of 62.2 million cubic feet. The 1993 flood has 1.1 million cubic feet of water flow past St Louis every second. At that rate the entire Alaska pipeline would need to be filled, flow, and emptied every minute for the 3 months that the flood continued. The engineering just isn't there yet.
On the other hand, it would be good to get a interstate distribution system for water like there is for electricity so that we don't need tanker trucks like was identified in the newspaper article. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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| The problem with such a distribution system would be security. Terrorists and all that. All it would take is a pound of LSD in a water supply, and you could kill thousands. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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| Wyatt, the Egyptians didn't transform the desert. The Nile naturally flooded every year, leaving massive deposits of silt for crops. Unlike us, the Egyptians were smart enough not to build permanent settlements in the area and evacuated in plenty of time before the flooding... |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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| The Egyptians als didn't join the 20th cemtury until the 1980's. And they still have a very low mortality rate. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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Jess, you might kill them or maybe they might all just see pink elephants
Wyatt, I would vote for you. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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Have to be careful how you read the Egyptian mortality rates...they don't include people considered "owned" or "slaves" in their numbers. One indicator of their respect for life is their infant mortality rate that is also only reported for people who are not "owned" or "slaves". Their infant mortality rate is 29.5 for 1000 live births. Not bad, but not great. US is 6.37 per 1000. for details and comparisons see: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
Management of water is critical to all our futures. I'd like to see some innovative thinking like Wyatt prescribes. |
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| November 05, 2007 |
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Is that like me buying a house in New Orleans?
Wyatt, seriously, as a contractor in an area that has much work as we have, finding the workers is unbelievably difficult, almost impossible.
I think the difficulty would be to find the people who will work at a proper rate and do good work for the money they have been paid. FEMA is proof that government sponsored laber employment is a disaster...and the country is full of examples why government doesn't seem to be able to find contractors in a just manner |
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