Vermont City Almost Encased In a 1-Mile Dome

destinyland writes "A Vermont city once proposed a one-mile dome over its 7,000 residents. (They paid $4 million a year in heating bills, and HUD seriously considered funding their proposal.) The city's architectural concept included supporting the Dome with air pressure slightly above atmospheric pressure. (Buckminster Fuller warned their biggest challenge would be keeping it from floating away...) There would be no more heating bills, fly-fishing all year, and no more snow shoveling. And to this day, the former city planner insists that 'Economically it's a slam dunk.'"

Comments

Re:Rain? Insects? Birds?

[MrBulwark]

Remember, it is still raining, just above the dome. It should be trivial to put collectors at teh base of the dome. I would hazzard a guess that it would provide the city with more water than they have currently. My concern would be the long-term durability of the "glass". After 20 years, will it yellow? Will it be so scratched up that everything outside will be a blur? Who is going to climb up there and clean all the bird poop off of it?

Lessons From Biosphere II

[smitty777]

I think this is one of those things that look good on paper, but...

There are so many ways this could go wrong. It might be a way to breed viruses into an entire city, or keep carcinogens trapped for all to breathe. The Biosphere II was a fairly disastrous small scale experiment along these lines. Just imagine having an "oops" moment for a city of 5.7 million.

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[radtea]

I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt.

I just get a blank page when I click on the link, so I'm not sure what the physical footprint of the town is, but when you consider modern sports stadia the ability to cover an area say 1 km across doesn't seem out of place. Modern materials are incredibly strong, and I would expect this dome would be designed as something like a kevlar rope net with panels in the holes to seal it. The internal atmospheric pressure will then keep the net under tension, and everything is good.

There is one big problem with it, which is that any failure is a catastrophic failure, albeit a catastrophe in slow motion. Unexpectedly high snow load, hurricane force winds, rocks falling from the sky and human error can all take structures of this kind down. I've seen two soccer domes fail under snow load (one was patchable and reinflatable) and know of another that was in the general vicinity of a tornado (nothing remained, although it was not actually hit by the tornado, it was just in the general area.)

As every engineer knows, if something can fail, it will. Domes like this can fail, therefore this one will. If the mean time between failure can be made long enough, it could still be worth-while, but I'd want to be sure that there was a re-inflation drill once a year or so (which policy would last for about a decade until some idiot in a suit realized they could pay themselves more today by leaving the people of tomorrow unprepared.)

There's also an interesting ecological twist: the ecosystem under the dome obviously can't be the local one, so you would have to replace a lot of vegetation with stuff that can survive without winter, and since the dome would inevitably become home to various exotic plants and animals it would be a continual source of invaders into the local ecosystem (which wouldn't survive the winter, but which would make every spring and summer a new surprise.)

Re:Houston Has Similar Plans

[Shotgun]

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I have built most of an airplane and studied a lot of aerodynamics in the process. The one thing I can say for certain is that ETFE cannot withstand a wind of 180mph, nor can any other "material". Materials don't withstand forces. Structures do. I can stick a cube of this stuff on the nose of an SR-71 and claim it survives Mach 4.5. Or I can make a sheet so thin that it comes apart in a slight breeze.

The statement you quoted is quite as meaningless as you surmised.