"I hope you've got good plumbing. I've been eating a lot of cheese lately. I just can't seem to get enough cheese." - Uncle Buck
I would think the terrorists would want something a bit more flashy and dramatic...like airplanes flying into buildings. Sounds more like shoddy workmanship and natural ground movement.
Don’t water mains tend to break more in the winter? I know every winter there are multiple breaks in DC water mains. They’re always announcing them because of affect on traffic.
Those two things have nothing to do with one another.
There are thousands and thousands of water mains in the country.
PS, sounds like all your sources are from the press!
You're going waaayyyy beyond reason here. What is your basis for saying water mains last "100 years?" Here in my town, the water mains that break tend to be older ones; or ones in areas with shifting soil.
How old are the lines that are breaking in all of those stories? What kinds of soil are they in? Are there other factors involved, such as digging in the area, or heavy traffic over a portion of the line?
The city employs several maintenance men and has several trucks because this kind of thing happens all the time. Maybe they are paranoid, too, but they are always digging up something somewhere.
It not just the water mains either.
Its all of our infrastructures.
Most cities are well over 100 years old and how many thousands of miles of water mains must there be in the US?
Considering the number of water mains in the country, I suspect thousands break daily.
I used to work in water/sewer. There is a LOT of pipe out there, mostly laid by government employees. On top of road built and maintained by government employees.
It is not surprising that there are a lot of breaks. Hell in ATL they don’t know where they are until a sinkhole shows up and a car falls in.
You might also be suprised how dynamic things are underground where there is a lot of underground water runoff. It’s not like you just plant a pipe and can forget about it. Things shift.
Guess that rules out the FReeper tradition of taking a shower with terrorism news.
It's probably a combination of age on the system, cold weather, and soil conditions. Plus somebody could have been excavating in the area.
If a section of your area has water mains all installed at about the same time, you can expect more breaks as the pipe nears the end of its useful life.
We have been dealing with this for years in the Atlanta metro, as the much-abused water system is failing in a "cascade effect" from lack of maintenance and upgrade. So is the sewer system - there have been a couple of spectacular main drain collapses, some involving loss of life. Thank heavens we moved to Cobb County!
Besides all that being found in the press, your links don’t work.
The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by “As We May Think,” a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a “trail” of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel.
So much for Wiki. Edmund Husserl came up with the basic idea in 1900. Nice try by the Bushes.
"I hope you've got good plumbing. I've been eating a lot of cheese lately. I just can't seem to get enough cheese." - Uncle Buck
I can’t speak for the other areas, but the water main break in Cleveland today was likely caused by the incompetence of decades of Democrat control of city government.
When you have a entrenched union city work force, coupled with city leadership more interested in social engineering and wealth redistribution, you end up with crumbling infrastructure.
Plenty of the blame goes to Kookcinich, but there’s a lot to go around within the political class that keeps getting elected to fix the problems they themselves created.
“Water Main Breaks” is code for suspicious event
forces area lockdown. Must investigate without
causing panic amongst the sheeple.
For the most industrialized developed nation on earth, this doesn’t sound like a lot to me. Imagine the number of miles of water mains there are throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands I’m sure.
Water mains can leak from a number of sources including joints, taps, connections, fittings and the pipe itself.
The term ‘water main break’ doesn’t mean jack.