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A Physicist Says He Can Tornado-Proof the Midwest With 1,000-Foot Walls
meghan elizabeth writes: Temple physicist Rongjia Tao has a utopian proposal to build three massive, 1,000-foot-high, 165-foot-thick walls around the American Midwest, in order to keep the tornadoes out. Building three unfathomably massive anti-tornado walls would count as the infrastructure project of the decade, if not the century. It would be also be exceedingly expensive. "Building such walls is feasible," Tao says. "They are much easier than constructing a skyscraper. For example, in Philadelphia, the newly completed Comcast building has about 300-meter height. The wall with similar height as the Comcast building should be much easier to be constructed." Update: 06/28 04:14 GMT by T : Note: originally, this story said that Tao was at Drexel rather than Temple -- now corrected
...kaiju protection.
Homeland Security will jump on this as the perfect opportunity to build a prison large enough to hold us.
Now we know why there are no Tornados in Westeros.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
If you can go with a slope and build it as a triangular prism then it is easy to build, like a long pyramid. Jobs, jobs, jobs!
If you're going to build something that large you might as well make it dual use. How about an archology?
The only natural predator of trailer homes are tornadoes. Are we prepared for the inevitable population explosion if we defeat tornadoes in the Mid-West? I don't think we'll be able to build Wal-marts fast enough.
If it is not exceedingly expensive, it's not the infrastructure project of the century.
Construct mighty engines of fearsome complexity and madness-inducing size to redirect the gyronormous aetheric power of these "tornadoes" towards the hated enemy.
Nobody thinks cyclopean these days, that's what's wrong with society.
In theory, everything works in practice. In practice, it doesn't.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
That it only works for square tornadoes on an infinite plane of uniform density?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to move all of the people in the midwest to China? That's where all the jobs went anyway
try {
while() {
build_wall();
tear_down_wall();
print( "Recovery!!!!1!!!!1!" );
}
}
catch (error) {
blame_Bush();
}
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The East German wall was put up to keep the East Germans from escaping Communism. Countless people died trying to get over the wall to the West. Is there any documented case of somebody trying to escape INTO East Germany over the wall?
Hey, those could be Solar Freakin' Walls and they could be made out of scratch-proof glass, topped with windmills and LEDs that you can see in the daytime and generate eleventysix times the electricity of [[transmission garbled]]
$160 million per mile, to prevent an average of 50-60 tornado deaths per year?
1) Build 1000 miles? Only $160 billion? Is that cost of labor alone? What about the cost of land?
2) Build just for cities? Which cities?
3) How does a city afford even 1 mile of wall?
We can drop nukes in tornadoes too for much less, not that I'm advocating that either.
Just last year, there were 32,850 vehicle fatalities in the good ol' USofA.
Driverless cars would've prevented 99% of the crashes. Let's concentrate on rolling those out first and soon.
Needs it's own Bad News Brian meme. Here you go.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
They're coming here, stealing our jobs. We need to build a fence to keep them out, and allow warrentless searches of anyone who looks like a tornado. Ironically, to save on costs, most of the wall will actually be built by tornadoes.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The proposal isn't to build a wall "around" anything. The proposal is to build three east-west walls to mimic the mountain ranges that have successfully limited supercell production in tornado alleys elsewhere on earth. Why OP threw in the word "around" is beyond me.
As an earthmoving project, each kilometer of wall is 18M cubic meters. The Panama Canal was about 250M cubic meters of earthmoving. So every 14KM of wall is one Panama Canal. The proposed Arabian Canal near Dubai (to create "valuable waterfront property" accessable by yacht) would require about 1100M cubic meters of earthmoving. So one Arabian Canal is about 60KM of wall.
In terms of speed, one Bagger 288 can move about 250K cubic meters of earth a day. That's 5KM of wall per year. With one such $100 million machine for every 100KM of wall, the project would take 20 years.
It's a big project, but not impossibly big. Just expensively big.
On the other hand, building a concrete *anything* that is a thousand feet tall and 165 feet thick isn't easy. They're claiming that a one-mile stretch of the wall would cost $160 million, which comes out to 871.2 million cubic feet of concrete, or a cost per cubic foot (including labour and materials) of about $0.18. That sounds really unlikely to me.
Let me put it this way, the hoover dam is actually relatively similar to what we're talking about here. It's roughly 700 feet tall, varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and is about a fifth of a mile wide... So let's say that the cross section of the hoover dam has about the same area as this proposed wall.
OK, so now we just need the length of the wall. Well, the circumference of the American midwest is roughly 3900 miles (cutting through the great lakes, because what the hell). So basically, what we need to do, is build the equivalent of roughly 20,000 hoover dams.
The hoover dam cost the equivalent of about $750 million to build. I suspect it would cost a lot more today than pure inflation would account for (unions, health and safety standards, etc), but let's say that technological progress would counteract all that...
So, $750 million, times 20,000... and we come up with $15 trillion.
I live in the Appalachian mountains. As I watch weather radar, observing weather systems come at us from the west, I've seen dozens if not hundreds of times over the years where very powerful, well-defined weather systems (individual cells as well as frontal systems) totally disintegrate as they cross over from flat regions of North Carolina and Tennessee into Virginia, because they hit a literal 1,000 foot wall of mountains. Tornadoes are extremely rare here. A few years ago we had small one that messed up a couple sheds and the canopy over a gas station, and that was the first in decades. So I do believe this physicist is onto something that would be effective. Whether or not it's practical or acceptable to construct such a thing is another question.
Better known as 318230.
Between the Higgs-Boson crap and this thread, I think Dice has decided to declare it "Give A Wingnut A Headline Week". :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
More importantly, how many tornadoes did Berlin have while the wall was up?
After the walls were up for a while, some jackass land developers and greedy politicians would start building houses on top. And then we'd all of a sudden have the problem of exposed property again.
Consider similar cases from history:
- Houses on flood plains.
- Houses right near beaches, especially eroding ones.
- Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
A wall such as the one proposed would act as a mountain range diverting prevailing winds upwards, this is the very reason "tornado alley" exists in the first place, the storm cells are the physical manifestation of turbulence created by mountains. If you want to keep tornados out with a wall, the wall will need to rise above the troposphere, ie: the cruising altitude of a passenger jet (~5 miles). And even then, you would get atmospheric currents rising into the stratosphere that resembled the equatorial Hadley cells, which are responsible for both monsoons and the sub tropical desert zones.
This physicist obviously hasn't thought this through and is looking only at the height of the tornado, however as a thought experiment it's truly worthy of a full xkcd "what if" analysis.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Salt Lake City and the Salt Lake basin are surrounded by much higher natural "walls". Downtown SLC still managed to get a tornado. No, it was not a massive F5, but it was definitely a tornado in a place that doesn't even usually get them. Any meteorologist will tell you that mountains don't prevent tornadoes, so I'm highly skeptical of the whole idea.
He's a physicist of course, so this only works on spherical chickens in a vacuum.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
> This idea is so batshit crazy...I think we should do it. I don't even care whether it works as advertised. The Great Wall of China will pale in comparison.
The idea of doing a gigantic project just because it's batshit crazy has an appeal, I grant you.
> This could be our Apollo.
Erm... we already had our Apollo... unless you're talking "our generation", in which case, get off my lawn.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> People could stop living in places where a tornado comes through every few years.
Unfortunately, that's where the food grows.
> You hear the same complaints about people living in flood plains
I think you do have a point there.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
at the corner where Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin meet, three farmers were talking over the fence. they find a magic lamp, and the Iowa farmer rubs it. out comes the genie, and splits the three wishes between them. the Iowa farmer says, "I would like this place to be green and fertile forever, rich and promising." BANG! the corn is ten feet tall. the Wisconsin farmer says, "Our state is so beautiful, I would like a thousand-foot wall all around it, so we can enjoy these hills, this water, the land forever without interlopers." BANG, fence.
the Minnesota farmer looks at the wall, and says, "Genie, we love our lakes. Fill that fence with water." BANG!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It would be much cheaper just to dump large amounts of powdered soap and water on them from a C130 to knock them apart. It would work better on a hurricane, dumping it on the rain bands would cause it to break up. The worst case scenario would be a 20 foot wall of suds moving at 80 mph, but it would be a clean city afterwards.
ok, so he doesn't mention a length... but lets just start with one mile.
The internal volume of 1000' * 165' * 5280' = 871,200,000 cubic feet
That's 32 million cubic yards.
Concrete, the most basic thing you'd have to make it out of averages about $75 per cubic yard.
So this thing would cost $2.4 billion dollars, per mile, to build.
This doesn't even factor in grading, paying workers, rerouting highways, etc...
Oh, and you'd likely consume all the concrete in the US, driving up the price and crash industries all over the country because of it.
Good luck!
I didn't see anything about the climate effect, if there would be one. Mucking around with wind flow in the area that makes a lot of our food may turn out to be a bad idea, in which case we'd get to see the biggest demolition project ever, and hope it's reversable.
There's a fairly easy way the death toll due to tornadoes could be lowered over time in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, etc -- adopt the same building codes we have in South Florida.
Most people don't realize it, but South Florida experiences the most urban tornadoes per square mile per year in the entire United States. Granted, we basically never see EF4 and EF5 tornadoes... but we get plenty of the smaller ones.
The strength of South Florida tornadoes is EGREGIOUSLY under-reported by the Enhanced Fujita scale, because the EF scale is defined primarily in terms of observed damage rather than measured wind speeds -- damage that just doesn't happen in Florida, even with directly-comparable storms. An EF1 tornado capable of wiping a neighborhood of matchstick McMansions off the map would barely make a dent in a neighborhood of concrete post-Andrew South Florida homes with large-missile impact glass windows (Google "ASTM 1886-1996"), and would probably be reported as an EF0 unless it hit a trailer park or a neighborhood with older homes. An EF1 tornado is basically 30 seconds of a category 1 or 2 hurricane... and a direct hit by a category 1 hurricane is the South Florida equivalent of a snow day in upstate New York.
Anyway, the point is, if homes in suburban Kansas were built from reinforced concrete, deaths from anything short of an outright EF5 monster would basically fall into the category of "rare, unfortunate freak accidents" in areas where all the buildings were built to Dade County standards.
Assorted SoFla torn-porn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Instead of building a giant wall, just require that any new buildings (including replacements for damaged/destroyed ones) built in Tornado Alley MUST be strong enough to withstand a certain amount of force, that way if its hit by a big tornado, it wont collapse. Its been done elsewhere (mostly in areas where cyclones/hurricanes are a problem but the same standards will stop all but the biggest/most extreme tornadoes).
Driverless cars weigh more, but if you put the car on a rail and let a computer drive it would move 10x faster on 10x less energy and have no accidents. I added the costs that it would take to build a system like that and then realized it would pay for itself in 5 years.
Welcome to Europe. Let me introduce you to this wonderful technology called "TRAINS" that we have here.
We've scaled up your plan a bit (they also transport 100x the number of passengers).
We've also jumped on the "electrical vehicle" bandwagon while we're at it (very few are still diesel powered)
(also there's a human in front who can override the system just in case, though some metropolitan transport have gone 100% driverless).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, this. I wonder why building codes in tornado-prone areas don't require tornado-proof construction.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
A wall such as the one proposed would act as a mountain range diverting prevailing winds upwards, this is the very reason "tornado alley" exists in the first place, the storm cells are the physical manifestation of turbulence created by mountains.
Don't you just love it when the Gaians on the continent west of you start terraforming up mountain ranges and all your rainy squares start disappearing?
Oh, and then there's the whole part where even though they're supposed to be the ecologically-sensitive faction they'll build just as much, if not more, boreholes and shit everywhere. Totally not inconsistent at all :)
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Picture a massless, spherical cow.
Now picture that massless, spherical cow bouncing like a pinball around a giant tornado hemmed in by a thousand-foot wall...
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.