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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.
Now we know why there are no Tornados in Westeros.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Okay...I am embarrassed...I WENT to Drexel. A 1000 ft wall AROUND the mid-west?
What happens if somebody decides to fill it with water?
One can only hope.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
What happens if somebody decides to fill it with water?
"Why have you broken your promise, O Lord?" *many sounds of construction, and animal noises*
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
I always thought the best method was to create inverted solar heated funnels with built in wind turbines at ground level and at the outlet, to basically create safety valves to enable hot air at ground level to continually vent to upper atmosphere and as a bonus provide energy to pay for the system. This to prevent the destructive funnel that would otherwise occur. You would need to space them so as to substantially reduce the risk of the natural funnel forming. You could also use them as communication towers, wireless and microwave broadband and mobile phones. As an additional bonus dependent upon region they can also collect water via direct rainfall as well as condensation.
So rather than just attempting to solve one problem badly. A little out of the box thinking and funnel, 'heh' 'heh', many problems into one solution and achieve a far higher level of cost efficiency.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
One can only hope.
A fine display of liberalism.
Yes, liberalism runs on hope.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The entire point of the wall is to change the climate by preventing moist gulf air and cold air from the north from mixing. The change to the rainfall regime would probably create an even larger desert than already exists in the area. If you do not believe me look at the current climate of northern China he cites. That is what will be created.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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:
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It works in Israel because there is a fraction of the linear border distance to fence and patrol and maintain. Israel has less than 760 kilometers of fence, The USA/Mexico border is around 3,169 km long. It also crosses some of the most inhospitable desert on the content. This adds more than a little difficulty in patrolling and maintaining any sort of 'fence'
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Yup, we in the US are racist for wanting some form of immigration control (keeping people from crossing the border south-to-north) but the Mexicans are simply exercising their sovereignty when they actual do work to prevent north-to-south movement.
At least he is currently modded +2 while you are modded -1.
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).
"Pantywaisted policies"? Fine. Swarm this land with Homeland "Security" goons to find anyone who looks a little brown, ask them sus papeles, por favor and beat the mierda out of them when they answer in English. Oh, and we want freedom and small government, too. And low taxes.
"Teach our kids Spanish"? Qué horror, que nuestros hijos aprendan otro idioma.
"Offer Spanish cable TV channels"? What have you got against the free market?
"Bilingual highway signs"? Citation needed, but yes, it's so much better to have people on the road who don't understand the signs.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
and success runs on work.
The best predictor of success in our society is parentage. Hard work is down around #7 someplace.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, that worked real well.
Actually, it's a common misconception to think that the Great Wall was built as a military defense mechanism in the event of full scale war. For one, it's too low, easily scalable by an army with the right tools. And secondly, it's too long, and can never be effectively manned along the full length. All in all, the Great Wall was never designed to function like a city wall.
What the wall really does, and it does well, is act as a deterent and early warning mechanism against the annual and semi-annual small scale border raids from the northern nomadic tribes, where riders would just charge down south, loot what they can and quickly retreat back into the great prairies. It's actually a (relatively) economical answer to a persistent problem -- for it's very expensive for a settled agricutural civilization to mobilize an army, while it costs almost nothing for the nomads to gather up a group of riders and raid a small border settlement.
And BTW, China is far from the only one in building a wall. Almost every settled civilization on the Eurasian continent, from Korea all the way to England, built a wall at some point in their history. The Chinese wall was the largest simply because China face the greatest threat from the Mongolian plains, which produced some of the most brutal and effiecient nomadic people in human history.