Second border wall contract for $167M of construction through Mid-Valley cities

Federal officials have approved another border wall contract, this one for the $167 million construction of 8 miles of levee wall system in the Rio Grande Valley. Awarded Nov. 11 to Galveston-based SLSCO, the project dubbed RGV-02 consists of construction in the Hidalgo County cities of Alamo, Donna, Weslaco, Progreso and Mercedes... Reinforced concrete levee wall will be constructed to reach the height of the existing levee in addition to steel bollards measuring 18 feet high being installed atop the concrete wall...

“I haven’t seen any planned wall design yet that won’t be scalable by the illegals.”

With ropes and ladders, people routinely scale Mount Everest.

Just because locking your door at night won’t stop a determined SWAT Team from breaching in, doesn’t mean that locks on doors are not worthwhile.

There is a numbers game at work on controlling the border. Stopping 90% of the traffic has a high value. It is significantly more expensive to stop 99%. Much more still to stop 99.999%. Nothing is impermeable.

So the approach is a “wall system” of open areas, sensors, cameras and lights for earlier and more reliable detection; Barriers to delay (and defeat a high percentage); with Patrol Road for faster response. They have to balance the equation of the difference between “Detection Time” to “Vanishing Time”, against “Intercept Time”.

Through experience and careful analysis, they can pretty accurately engineer what is needed in a particular location. In an urban location where fence hoppers can disappear into people’s backyards, hop into a car or run into a mall in under a minute; they need exceptional barrier and early detection. In wild lands that require days of travel on foot, you can reliably detect and intercept without any barrier, given enough technology and people.

You can engineer barrier to just flat out defeat a certain percentage of the population from unaided climbing. Eighteen foot bollards pretty much screen out all but a set of fit young men. Anti-climb plate on eighteen foot bollards (if installed without gaps) effectively defeat unaided fit young men. To defeat climbers with aids (ropes and ladders) quickly becomes prohibitively expensive - fifty foot wall, fifty one foot ladder. So other techniques are employed to address rope and ladder attacks.

With a 150 foot clear enforcement zone South of the barrier, early detection makes it difficult to stage assaults that require a lot of gear. In high traffic areas, the enforcement zones are lighted at night, under constant monitoring by cameras, and alarmed with sensors that detect as soon as someone sets foot in the zone. Cops and drones can be on the way before they can emplace their ladder, or start throwing ropes.

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