23 Comments

1. Knucklehead:

Heh, it ain’t like Bobby and John didn’t try to warn y’all.

Feb 21, 2005 - 12:14 pm 2. Terrye:

No doubt it is Bush’s fault. If only he had signed the Kyoto Protocol none of this would be happening.

They say it is the fifth wettest winter out there, I guess all those other winters happened before 1968.

This too shall pass. It will probably stop and won’t rain again for a year.

Once I was trapped by flood waters and it scared me spitless. I will never forget the sound of the water.

Give me a drought anytime.

Feb 21, 2005 - 12:48 pm 3. Anthony (Los Angeles):

I’m that rarity of rarities, a native Southern Californian, and I have trouble remembering this much water being dumped on LA in such a short time, particularly when counting the Christmas ‘04 storms. I had thought the El Nino of 1981 or 1982 was as ferocious, but perhaps it didn’t last as long.

Feb 21, 2005 - 1:21 pm 4. heather:

well, Up Here, in the Yukon (to the right of Alaska), we are having an amazing amount of snow, which we have to shovel a LOT. Usually, one good snow is all that happens all winter, and the fact that the land is white all winter is only because the sprinkles we get never melt.

Maybe California will graduate to monsoon seasons??

Feb 21, 2005 - 1:30 pm 5. Wallace:

Just asking but….are they trying to fill that entire massive hole in with concrete one mixer load at a time? In Texas we have developed other less expensive, more time efficient means of doing the job!

Feb 21, 2005 - 1:50 pm 6. Ron Wrght:

Roger,

You must have just missed it. I recall it was either 1967/68 the last time we had a big rain. The year my older son was born, 1983, it also came a big flood. Before that I think it was the late thirties.

Problem is with more and more land covered with concrete, blacktop, roofs, large vegatation burns instead of many smaller ones, it takes less water to make an impact. Also by channelizing the creek beds with concrete it doesn’t allow the water to settle in much. I would image Venice and Seal Beach will be hasmat zones again because of all the storm runoff carrying all our “gunk” out to the ocean.

Feb 21, 2005 - 2:15 pm 7. lindenen:

We’ve had the most absurdly nonexistent winter I’ve seen in quite some time. Most days it’s been 50-60F. I want snow! We’ve gotten only a dusting, here in Richmond, VA.

Feb 21, 2005 - 2:15 pm 8. truepeers:

Wallace, I dont’ get it, what do you do in Texas?

Feb 21, 2005 - 2:29 pm 9. Skookumchuk:

Jared Orsi – for all the disaster techno-geeks.

Feb 21, 2005 - 2:31 pm 10. PJ:

I’m a flatlander, too, Roger, but if we get too much more rain I dunno where it’s all gonna go because the land is completely saturated.

Feb 21, 2005 - 2:48 pm 11. chuck:

truepeers,

I’m guessing that in Texas they can fill these holes right up with cars provided by the motoring public. Cheap, fast, and effective.

Feb 21, 2005 - 2:53 pm 12. Terrye:

Years ago when I was a child my parents took a trip from Oklahoma to California. Like many Okies we had relatives in California and my mother wanted to visit them and see the ocean.

We took route 66 and the night before we were to enter the state my Dad stopped at a motel with a horse on a neon sign. He thought we could get up early and finish the drive. As we came into California the following day there was a rainbow and below the mountains in the foot hills there were purple flowers everywhere. I said to my father “Look Daddy, it is a fairyland”.. He said “No honny, that is no fairyland, that is California”.

Today I suppose it would be all lights and concrete, but back in the late spring of 1956 it was paradise.

I hope it stops raining soon.

Feb 21, 2005 - 5:05 pm 13. truepeers:

Doh!! I guess I’m the unimaginative type that gets sacrificed in Texas.

Feb 21, 2005 - 5:14 pm 14. triticale:

And here I always thought G-d was warning Noah of the coming of diversity.

Feb 21, 2005 - 5:28 pm 15. Knucklehead:

Truepeers,

I don’t know firsthand what they do in Texas when it comes time to fill in Very Large Holes, but I saw the news video of that concrete truck plop-plopping out dribs and drabs of concrete and I couldn’t help thinking that in most places they would have filled Very Large Dumptrucks with lottsa fill dirt (or municipal waste in NJ) and dumped those into the VHL until it was no longer a VHL. Then comes the concrete and such. It’s gonna take what my mom called “a month of Sundays” to fill that VHL y’all got there by pouring one mixer full o’ concrete at a time. And when you get it filled its gonna be like the Hoover dam – still curing 30 years later.

Feb 21, 2005 - 5:33 pm 16. mythusmage:

According to the local news we’ve got another system coming in sometime in the next couple of days. Haven’t checked any weather site, but so far my hometown has gotten a few inches of its own. We’re now at something like 26″ for the year. Still 9″ short of the record.

Mudslides, a boulder that killed a 16 year old girl, and the usual flooding. It’s been bad.

For details on the above, go visit the San Diego Union/Tribune web site.

Feb 21, 2005 - 6:55 pm 17. BigFire:

For the 3rd times in the past month, our little stretch of Woodland Hills lost power. Last time, it knock my Linux server out of comission, as well as having 28 hours of outage. This time, the managed to limit the outage to a mere 13 hours…

Feb 21, 2005 - 8:27 pm 18. Pat Curley:

I have 4-foot weeds in the back yard (and I live in Phoenix!).

Feb 21, 2005 - 9:16 pm 19. Wallace:

Wallace, I dont’ get it, what do you do in Texas?

We just let the holes just naturally fill up with oil, add gravel….and voila, instant asphalt. :>]

Actually I was thinking of something more mundane like filling it in with dirt. Maybe dirt is to expensive in California?

Feb 21, 2005 - 9:29 pm 20. truepeers:

I just saw this story on the tv news. They said they were presently trying to stabilize the growing hole. I guess that is what the cement if for.

Feb 21, 2005 - 9:54 pm 21. ed:

Hmmm.

I hate to promote the idea of yet another federal boondoggle but I’ve been wondering for years if we didn’t need a national infrastructure for water management. Currently all water management is largely in either the municipal, state or regional level. There’s nothing on a national level.

Which really doesn’t make sense. We have national rail systems, road systems and electrical systems. But water isn’t collected or shifted on a national basis. Basically what I’m suggesting is a national infrastructure of large pipes + pumping stations. It would possibly be a private operation comprised of a number of regional companies that would provide a co-ordinated service. Water distribution, costs and pricing would be based on a commodities model. Where water is plentiful, it’s cheap. Where it’s lacking, it’ll be a little more expensive. But having a national system would have a number of advantages.

One advantage is risk management for businesses, governments and industries. Quite a few places are heavily water dependent and so are many businesses. If water is lacking, this is unmanaged risk. By allowing the purchase and delivery of water on a national scale, it allows the management of risk.

Another advantage is elminating the restrictions on growth for numerous areas that are heavily water dependent. There are many places in America where water is an extremely serious issue due to construction and drought.

Another advantage is eliminating drought. While there are some seriously dry aras of America, not every place in America is dry at the same time. Some places end up with too much water, overall or at the wrong times of the year, while others are begging for water. By being able to shift massive amounts of water from one region to another, drought could largely be eliminated.

Another advantage is in flood control. As part of the infrastructure would be the ability to pump massive quantities of water from flood prone areas. While it wouldn’t prevent all flooding, it could lessen the both the threat and the damage greatly. This water could be shifted to large purpose-built reservoirs where the water would be allowed to silt out.

Frankly I think this could be very helpful.

Feb 21, 2005 - 10:31 pm 22. Knucklehead:

Ed,

This thread is probably long since dead, but I agree that we need some national level discussion about what constitutes national level infrastructure. Maybe broadcast frequencies aren’t worth worrying about anymore and water, among other things, is.

Feb 22, 2005 - 1:24 pm 23. ed:

Hmmm.

I focused on water due to a number of factors. Water limits both developmental growth and economic growth. Excessive water causes billions of dollars in destruction each year. A national infrastructure would mostly connect regional water systems. If, for some bizzare reason, Global Warming really is happening then water reallocation is going to be an even greater necessity. Additionally by putting a price on watersheds there becomes an economic benefit to leaving such areas pristine and underdeveloped.

Frankly the single biggest positive factor would be the creation of a water trading board in Chicago.

So the system, that I’m envisioning, would consist of large interstate/intrastate water pumping systems with the pipes emplaced along the interstate highway right of ways. This pumping system would have a multitude of connections, and multiple pipes, for handling processed/purified water and runoff from the storm systems.

The water from the storm systems would be piped to large regional tank farms where primary silting and initial treatment would take place. Then the water would be pumped to a different set of reservoirs, for semi-permanent storage, or shipped out of state. The primary treatment farms would be off-limits to the public, as there would be machinery and such.

But the reservoirs could easily be formed as a series of man-made lakes. And these lakes could be placed in odd out of the way places. A whole series of such lakes could be placed in Iowa or Kansas as an example. Or perhaps Montana. I’m not picking on lower population states, just those that have been experiencing more than their fair share of droughts.

*shrug* I think it would work very well.

Feb 22, 2005 - 7:28 pm

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