Free Republic

Israel Is Planning an ‘Inland Suez Canal’ Across Its Desert. At What Cost? Israel's planned high-speed train to Eilat: dream or potential environmental train wreck? In theory, it sounds amazing: a high-speed train to Eilat, the country’s southernmost city on the shores of the Red Sea. This was attested to by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his recent Knesset speech enumerating the new government’s goals, in which he described it as a major national project: “The mission is to develop the country’s infrastructures, including developing a high-speed rail that will travel hundreds of kilometers per hour and connect the country...

...Pierre-Paul Riquet, the man behind one of the 17th century's greatest works of engineering -- and some say, works of art -- remains in Vauban's shadow, despite his life's accomplishment, which was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. This 150-mile long waterway was once known as the Canal Royal en Languedoc, for good reason. French revolutionaries may have removed the 'royal' from its title in 1789, yet this is a canal which remains fit for a king. Dappled sunlight streams onto its emerald-green water from between the leaves of the 42,000 plane and oak trees which line...

Environmentalist argues that conveying brine to the Dead Sea could cause irreparable damage to the basin. The cross-border water swapping and sharing partnership, Interior Minister Silvan Shalom and Jordanian Water and Irrigation Minister Hazim El Naser announced the issuance on Monday of initial tendering documents for the forthcoming "Red-Dead" project. The ministers met on Monday on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, where they jointly launched a prequalification tender for the plans - printed in various local and international media on Tuesday. The tender, they explained, will enable the advancement of the $800 million project that will supply water...

"Officials say the new waterway will be a symbol of the new Egypt" Few things in Egypt are more iconic, revered and profitable than the Suez Canal. So in a bid to refloat the country's ailing economy, President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is building another one. He broke ground on the second Suez Canal last August, at a ceremony full of pomp and patriotism. With fighter jets conducting aerial displays overhead, Egypt's new strongman promised it would be "a channel of prosperity". Tight deadline It was not plain sailing at the start. There was some flooding at the drilling site...

Why shipping choke points like Panama are FUBAR and getting worse. Long, detailed explanation of all the problems.

Some of Venice’s smaller canals have almost dried up due a prolonged spell of low tides, frustrating boat crews and bewildering tourists. The prolonged stretch of ebb tides is linked to a lingering high-pressure weather system over much of Italy, experts say. Since the canals essentially serve as streets in car-less Venice, the phenomenon of the last days has added to the challenges of everyday life in the lagoon city. Ambulance boats have had to tie up further from some destination, forcing medical crews to carry stretchers over long distances as their vessels cannot progress up canals reduced to a...

DELRAY BEACH, FL — A Delray Beach woman was rescued from a storm drain this week, nearly two years after police found her naked and stuck in another storm drain weeks after her boyfriend reported her missing. According to a report by WFLA, Delray Beach police responded to a canal near Lindell Boulevard after someone reported a person in possible distress. When officers arrived, they asked a woman later identified as Lyndsey Kennedy if she needed help; however, she ignored them and climbed into a storm drain pipe, WFLA reported. Police said Kennedy refused to leave the drain and was...

The Corinth Canal is a waterway that crosses the narrow isthmus of Corinth to link the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf...It is believed that Periander, the tyrant of Corinth (602 BC), was the first to conceive of the idea of digging the Corinth Canal. As the project was too complicated given the limited technical capabilities of the times, Periander constructed the diolkós, a stone road which allowed ships to be transferred on wheeled platforms.Later on, Macedonian king Dimitrios Poliorkitis (c. 300 BC) tried to dig the canal, but his team of engineers warned him that if a connection...

The year 2021 ended with a major ‘peel’ for the site as LiDAR-equipped drones helped find 12 previously unknown small structures in Machu Picchu National Park which help identify the caretakers of the complex back in the 15th century. The LiDAR also revealed previously unknown canals that show how the Incas controlled water – a feat they believed was a ‘superpower’ granted to them by the gods. As described in a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team of researchers from the Center for Andean Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Wroclaw (Poland) University...

The Car Dyke is an eighty mile artificial water channel, thought to have been constructed by the Romans from the first century AD... The Dyke runs along the western edge of the fens from the River Cam near Cambridge all the way to the River Witham, just south of Lincoln. Many stretches are protected as a scheduled ancient monument... William Stukeley... came up with the idea that Car Dyke was a canal... to supply the Roman Armies of the north with grain and food from Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire with drainage as a secondary function, a view which still perpetuates until...

President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care. Republican elected...

“MASON CITY: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.” — Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men” (1946) WASHINGTON — Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring...

From my Free Web Book 'AncientCanalBuilders.com' The largest wide-array man made (or at least non natural) structure in the world is in fact an ancient terra formed systems of agricultural-aquaculture canals in Northwestern Botswana and Northeastern Namibia, north of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. Obviously quite ancient, the canal systems no longer provide free flowing water throughout its 105,000 mile array, but many sections show obvious intention to provide cross sectional irrigation. These canals are too evenly spaced over too large an area to be any kind of natural formation. Based on entry and exit points, it is readily...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE WARRIOR, KIRKUK - Farmers in Riyadh, a small agricultural community in western Kirkuk, need water. Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division recently employed 85 people around the town of Riyadh to clean up the canals that distribute water throughout the district. Water released from the Dokan Dam, well across the border between the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government and Iraq, flows down stream via the Lower Zab River to the Dibbis reservoir in western Kirkuk province. There it is released periodically based on seasonal agricultural needs and water availability, according...

FOB DELTA — Iraqis are cleaning the 250-kilometer Hahwar canal system to improve the distribution of water from the Tigris river to southwest Wasit province. The canal system provides water to 59,000 acres of crop land, roughly 10 percent of the arable land in Wasit, which is home to over 2,000 farmers. “It’s been almost two years since the canals were cleaned, and it was a government project,” said Ahmed Abed Alwaaly, the contractor in charge of the project. “This project is better.” The $378,000 canal cleaning project is funded by the Iraqi Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (ICERP) and was...

Italy is to reopen medieval and Renaissance inland waterways so that tourists can travel more than 500 kilometres (300 miles) by boat from Lake Maggiore to Venice via Milan. This summer engineers will start clearing eight kilometres of canals from the southern end of Lake Maggiore at Sesto Calende to Somma Lombardo. Alessandro Meinardi, of the Navigli Lombardi (Lombardy Canals) company, which is overseeing the project, said that the aim was to make navigable the whole of the 14th-century 140-kilometre stretch of waterways from Locarno in Switzerland to Milan. The restored canal system would eventually link up with the River...

Investigating canals across time, from spaceUr takes a step back to see ancient networks By Alvin Powell Harvard News Office Jason Ur: 'If you press your nose against a Monet, all you see is a blur. If you take a few steps back, you see lilies, you see bridges. For this reason, remote sensing data is really irreplaceable.' (Staff photos Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office) < The view from space of an ancient canal network is recasting archaeologists' understanding of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and of the farming economy that supported it at its height of power almost 3,000 years...

Photograph courtesy of Tom D. DillehayRUNNING WATER The sites of ancient irrigation canals. People in Peru's Zaña Valley dug the canals as early as 6,700 years ago to divert river water to their crops. In the Andean foothills of Peru, not far from the Pacific coast, archaeologists have found what they say is evidence for the earliest known irrigated agriculture in the Americas. An analysis of four derelict canals, filled with silt and buried deep under sediments, showed that they were used to water cultivated fields 5,400 years ago, in one case possibly as early as 6,700 years ago,...

New Orleans Levee Failure Analysis - Part V Contents Introduction and Basic Levee Construction, Section and Elevation Details Section 1. Pre-Landfall Flooding in Kenner and Western Metairie of East Jefferson Parish Section 2. Analysis of the 17th Street and London Canal Breaches and Post Katrina Flood Sequence in Downtown New Orleans Section 3. Surge Sequence for the Industrial Canal Basin, Analysis of the Five Major Breaches and east Orleans Parish Flooding Section 4. Flood Sequence for St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, MRGO Reach Failure Analysis Section 5. Contributory Causality, Political and Funding Issues Leading to Levee Failures...

LAFAYETTE, La. (Army News Service, Sept. 26, 2005) – Thousands of Soldiers are providing food and water to stranded residents along the Texas-Louisiana border following flooding from Hurricane Rita. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers worked throughout the weekend to repair a breach in the Industrial Canal. About 400 huge sandbags and tons of rock, placed primarily with military helicopters, have stopped the inflow of water into the lower 9th Ward, officials reported. They said pumping operations have already begun to remove the floodwaters from the area. Less than 12 hours after Hurricane Rita struck the southwest...