Katrina Live Thread, Part XI

Various ^ | 30 August 2005 | Various

[Mo1]

If the roads weren't flooded or destroyed that might be an option

Are all roads down and flooded?

[MarMema]

My god, someone take this over before they kill everyone that's left alive.

Exactly what I have been thinking all day today.

[Palladin]

I heard both Mary and Kathleen say earlier on TV that it is NOT a toxic soup, it is "just water". Should we believe them?

[Spktyr]

No, it's called NO, LA, and the Klinton Administration didn't do anything about it.

Those breakwaters took over a decade to design and build, btw, and they're still anything but trouble-free.

[flutters]

Updates as they come in on Katrina

09:22 PM CDT on Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Tom Planchet

9:23 P.M. - FEMA bringing 2,000 officials to town. Bringing in food, water, ice, tarps. Setting up offices where you can get grants and loans.

9:21 P.M. - (AP) One Mississippi county alone said its death toll was at least 100, and officials are "very, very worried that this is going to go a lot higher," said Joe Spraggins, civil defense director for Harrison County, home to Biloxi and Gulfport.

Thirty of the victims in the county were from a beachfront apartment building that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water as Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds.

9:19 P.M. - Lt. Governor Landrieu: Asking hotels in neighboring states to extend stays of refugees and to give them first priority and to possibly offer discounts for extended stays.

9:18 P.M. - Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu: 3000 rescued to date. People taken from rooftops, attics and from water, clinging to inner tubes.

9:17 P.M. - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says hundreds, if not thousands, of people may still be stuck on roofs and in attics, and so rescue boats were bypassing the dead.

[spanalot]

Sorry - from a previous post that noted that the engineers that win govt bids for levees and sewage plants and flood pumps are not Phi Beta Kappa and can barely speak english.

I was commenting on your concern for waterproofing pumps - its done all the time - Motors up high with long shafts to pumps below.

[Fritzy]

Nope not handing out anything... take a large piece of land away from NO.. use the knowledge gained from the Homestead Florida tent city... get the Army to move those people out of NO ASAP.. into the tent city.. so how to begin...what happened to the University Studies.. the City's emergency plans.. work plans etc... they have been aware of such an event for decades....

Stay off the television.. we have had enough of the Political/quasi leadership bunch telling us how bad it is .. unless they have a specific action to talk about.. keep their energy focused on actions.. they should be:

Calling an immediate meeting of all heads of services with the agenda designed to have a strategy and individual missions defined.. this should be done now.. tonight.. tomorrow morning at 7 AM..no one leaves the meeting until everyone know just what they are going to do and when..

Then just do it... let everyone know what is happening.. not with hours of TV debate.. but with swift action...

Engage the Military forces.. this is like a war campaign.. except it is against a disaster... use the same energy and valor.. how do the Military get through deep water??? How did they build "instant" bridges in World War II..

This is the Hurricane Season.. as a long time Florida resident, I can tell you that other storms will come... we can either sit and discuss it.. or darn the torpedoes and full speed ahead... probably not a position that politicians would like to take...

Again.. let's not reinvent a plan. let's call in some Miami experts to help.. who is the national expert on hurricane disaster recovery.. don't tell me the Red Cross.. I am talking serious work here...

OK.. off my soap box.. now chew me up.. I am OK with it.. just very concerned about all of the folks in the Big Easy..

Cheers!

The Fritzy

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

I'd be nervous right now if I lived near the San Andreas fault. At least NO had advanced notice.

[Arizona Carolyn]

These ladies were taking shoes.

[Coldwater Creek]

You are a lawyer and you start every post with "to be honest" LOL

[eyespysomething]

--If these matters can be attributed to federal cutbacks under Bush, he's in trouble.

Congress spends the money.

And I gripe as loud as the next that there is no spending bill, no bill in fact, that Bush won't sign. If they had gotten it to his desk, he would have signed it.

[jeffers]

"To: jeffers

So the lake is going to rise from 5 feet above normal to 10 feet? That is hard to believe. There is a a very large gap between the lake and the gulf. It must be a couple of miles wide."

You will have to take that question to the hydraulics guys, I'm not qualified to answer it. All I can do is interpret what they are saying now.

[Mo1]

Yea .. I heard he has a plan ;0)

[burzum]

It makes perfect sense. I've seen tons of pumps that are air-cooled. You have to cool the rotor and stator of the motor or the windings will burn up. While it is possible to design a pump to operate with a canned rotor and be completely sealed, it is much more expensive to operate and maintain. Here are some important components that you need to cool: rotor, stator, thrust bearings, radial bearings, and perhaps the pump packing seals. If your pump is sealed, you must use some external pure water cooling system. You must do this because if you use salt-water on the bearings, you will destroy them. They simply do not have the clearances to allow this (nor would you want them to). If you are pumping fresh water and your pump is very small, you can use the liquid that you are pumping to cool the pump. You can't do this with dirty water and a very large pump (hundreds of KW to MW range).

[SlowBoat407]

Put the motors and diesels on the second floor - connected bvy a long shaft to the submersed pump - its a no brainer.

And the specs for a system of gearboxes, transmissions, and a shaft that can take the torque at that length to run those pumps would scare off even the wealthiest city, not to mention, NO.

Your solutions are great for an unlimited budget and a starry-eyed technology, but we have to deal with the real world, in which pumps and motors live within certain limits in order to be affordable and work consistently without inordinate maintenance.

While we're at it, let's just build a dome over the whole city, air condition it, and protect it from all kinds of bad things.

You can't just drop a rock in a canal and stop the water. You can't just thread drive shafts all over a pump house, and you can't tell a city what technology they should've had in place when it is nowhere near realistic.

[Blogger]

San Andreas? How about New Madrid. All this weight of flood water is just south of that fault.

[operation clinton cleanup]

He should come to San Francisco some time. ;)

Or Cincinnati...

[GOP_Proud]

< Some of the looters were POLICE Officers (just showed the video on MSNBC).... Marty Savaage is going to show the whole video tomorrow morning on the (urgh) Today Show.

---

Thought the Police looter were getting food & water for flood victims, not expensive good. Must be two different situations. >

They were stealing. It was very obvious and he caught them red handed. Normally, I would never recommend watching Today, but this is worth it.

[supercat]

Without water, most of them will die first.

How hard would it be to airlift crates of bottled water and MREs to the SuperDome?

[dawn53]

I was listening to a press conference from BR, I guess it was live.

The Army Corps of Engineers is now talking about using whatever they can to block the canal, on top of trying to fix the levee.

Somebody on FR suggested this hours ago...maybe they've been reading FR and getting ideas, LOL.