Posted on 05/31/2017 4:51:54 AM PDT by rktman
It’s 102 degrees, just north of Palm Springs. White wind turbines, two stories high, dot the desert landscape all of the way to the base of snowcapped mountains in the distance.
Seismologist and earthquake expert Lucy Jones is standing on a small hill looking south, towards California’s most consequential fault: the San Andreas. It runs nearly the length of the state, from the Salton Sea to near Mendocino. From where we’re standing, the only evidence of the fault are slight indentations in the earth, snaking through the landscape. There are rocks and soil that’ve been moved by years of tectonic plates shifting below us.
Jones is surrounded by scrub brush and government officials from across Southern California. She’s brought them to bake in the desert sun to convince them that they need to do more to get ready for “the big one.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ww2.kqed.org ...
I don't think this guy did any research on wind turbines. One blade alone is longer than a rail car.
Yeah, I think you’re right on that. Can’t remember but I think they’re at least 180’ ft high Then again I’m not sure what the correct height is for proper bird whacking.
My thought too - Made a trip to State of NY recently and when I got to the State was the first time/place I saw some wind turbines - counted 14 on one hill and only 3 were turning.
Well according to new math, that would equate to a 90% success rate. We recently came through Palmdale CA on the way back to NV and there in the distance were 100s of them blocking our view shed. From what we could see maybe half were operating. Ugly as heck.
They don't have to turn to serve their primary purpose of pumping dollars from your pocket to subsidize the manufacturers, installers, landowners, politicians, etc, etc, etc.
Iowa is awash with these flipping monsters.
Good point.
I had a construction yard with a quansit hut warehouse back in ‘81 near where Jones is standing. There was just one experimental wind tower there. It was beautiful there just before the boom of the eighties. The quakes started in ‘85-’94, with the Northridge quake where I happened to live there at the time. Man, I never thought the earth could move that violently. On second thought there was this chick one night.......
Have them in West Texas. Gives some relief to the flat nothingness. Same deal with them not all working
Doesn’t scare me any more than reports of fire and brimstone raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah would have troubled my far away ancestors. If somehow the reputation of those towns reached them and then news came through of their demise they’d probably have concluded what a lot of us will when the West Coast gets nailed ... God will not be mocked.
Saying the sky is falling does no good after the 10th time.
If she wants to get people with money to pay attention, she needs to put the damage into specific economic impacts;
- In CITY_X $ will be required to fix the broken water lines or $ amount to replace/retrofit these locations (That cross the fault). I suspect the retrofit is less than rebuilding.
- In CITY_X $ will be needed to repair (fuel/gas/water) pipeline or $ to replace/retrofit theses areas.
etc.
That will get people and companies to move. Even if the numbers are off a bit, they’ll get the right people looking.
New big wind turbines in Iowa are over 350 feet to the hub.
Oh, a 3 atory building then. LOL!
30+ stories.
Blades on the big popular Siemens models are 170 feet long.
They’re seen rolling down highways in one piece.
There are ones out in Rio Vista with 96 foot blades which, given their installation put the swing diameter in the neighborhood of 250 feet, and they’re at least twice that above ground.
She retired last year from the USGS and Caltech Seismology Lab after 31 yrs of work at USGS and now runs a policymaker’s communication firm.
I don’t know her stance on global warming, but she came from an arena where she likely knows about HAARP. If she doesn’t then she might be more of a bureaucratic PhD than a real scientist.
IMHO, there is probably more risk of HAARP triggering the “Big One” than normal events, but we are due for a seismic event and the smaller ones have died out for several years now.
The appeal to seismic retrofits isn’t that significant, as it is now all codified in the IBC and CaBC for at least the last 20 years and continues to be updated. The problem is most engineers in authority don’t know the recent codes and more and more design work is outsourced by the Internet to firms without any experience in designing seismic features in their structures. Special inspections are known by some municipalities, but generally unknown by 80% of the construction workforce, even QC, so they aren’t always implemented.
The largest impact will be infrastructure.
Poorly written article.
The ones in W. Texas are fun to see from the air.
If you look closely you can see that they are on the precipice of a bluff, I guess to make the most of the wind there.
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