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Japan To Build 250-Mile-Long, Four Storey-High Wall To Stop Tsunamis
An anonymous reader points out this daunting construction plan in Japan. "Japanese authorities have unveiled plans to build a giant 250-mile long sea barrier to protect its coastline from devastating tsunamis. According to the proposals, the £4.6bn ($6.8bn) barrier would reach 12.5m high in some places – stretching taller than a four storey building. It would be made out of cement – and actually be composed of a chain of smaller sea walls to make construction easier. The plan comes four years after a huge tsunami ravaged Japan's north-eastern coast."
.... but their beaches, usually not so much. So hopefully this won't be too much of an eyesore. Japan is usually pretty good about trying to fit human-made structures into the landscape; my friends and I had a running joke when we were there: "They have the prettiest drainage ditches here!" ;) That said, a 250-mile long, 4-story "anything", that's going to be hard to make look nice.
I'm rather curious about what kind of concrete they're going to use. Japan has been a pioneer in the use of fiber-reinforced concrete, I wonder if they'll use that in lieu of steel that may need cathodic protection in such a high salt environment?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
A huge wall seems like an ugly and in-elegant solution. Building large mounds of forested areas would be much more attractive and useful (as a wildlife, tourist, and a tree resource). As a backup - build man made lakes at a higher altitude that can dump into the ocean in under 20 minutes and time the water dump to coincide with the tsunami. I would much rather be surrounded by trees and lakes than look at a big, ugly wall when I went to the beach.
We are the tsunami watchers on the wall. Waves gather, and the soiling of my pants begin.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
In 2010 I visited a small town in Iwate where a high tsunami wall had been built 40 years before. In March 2011, the town has been completely devastated by the tsunami. Will the new wall be high and solid enough? That's an interesting question, but we won't probably know the answer (fortunately) before another few hundred years.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Good-bye 12.49 Meter tsunamis, welcome 13 meter tsunamis.
It doesn't matter how big you engineer for, sooner or later something big enough will come along and topple everything. Containing high water levels in nature has been tried many times before and they always fail sooner or later.
If the NIMBYs have a problem with windmills "destroying the view", imagine how they'd react to this plan if it were enacted here in North America.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Make no misstake this is just a way for construction companies owned by policy makers to soak up large amounts of money.
Don't try to work against nature. Move new construction in the village up the nearby hills. That is the solution a Chilean city came up with.
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/23/rebuilding-chile-constitucion-earthquake-tsunami
I like how the theft^Wprice has been neatly fixed in advance :)
May as well build an anti gravity device and get done with it ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The problem is the wall itself. There will be earthquakes to first crack it.
And "water always wins", as the Doctor says.
Have we learned nothing from history? We need giant wave-breaking robots piloted by a pair of unlikely heroes to stop the tsunamis. Preferably with giant extendable swords to cut the breakers down to size.
It also doubles as an anti-Kaiju wall. Just the thing to keep out those pesky monsters like Mothra, Gamera, and Godzilla*
* May not actually keep Godzilla out.
the Kaijus?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
You could not build any critical infrastructure within a set distance from the coast, and no habitable buildings within a second less restrictive distance. This is basic risk mitigation. You don't build critical facilities on a fault line, you shouldn't build one in the direct path of a (potential) tsunami. Go look at the USGS website, or any of a number of wind zone maps. All this stuff has data and is plotted out for the US - all you have to do is set your risk factor (50 years for hurricane/snow, 500 for earthquake in the US) and note your exceptions.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well at least people will *feel* safe.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Cue the Pacific Rim references and the good the Wall did them.
South-east Australia already has a similar barrier. We call it "New Zealand".
- Chuq
Surely you mean concrete.
Cement is only one ingredient in concrete.
This will be a hilariously bad waste of money.
This thing won't protect against a tsunami unless it is 4 average buildings thick. (the typical square-ish building)
It will be like putting a paper wall up and hoping it will protect against a sumo wrestler running at it.
Honestly, a better idea would be hundreds of separate towers similar to a meta-material that dampen the entire wave by making it interfere with itself so much it eventually becomes a high tidal wave by the end of it.
Hell, a pattern of / \/ \/ \ channels would destroy the waves momentum pretty hard if you stagger them in the right way.
Considerably cheaper and doesn't completely block the flow of the ocean.
There will be an earthquake and it will fall on someone
"But the sullen ocean answered with a louder, deeper roar,
And the rapid waves drew nearer, falling sounding on the shore;"
--William Thackeray King Canute
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Since I'm not an expert in fluid mechanics, my first question would be, not that a wall would be totally unhelpful, but would it be far more useful, practical and conservative to find a way to break the momentum of the water hitting the land?
I saw artificial reefs suggested above, but are there any other methods of doing this?
I don't know, I mean Pacific Rim jokes aside (which I'm very glad to see a number of you were on top of as I loved that movie), but I think a wall seems a short-sighted an impractical solution, particularly since no one can really prepare for the worst possible tsunami without sticking the island under a dome built out of adamantium.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
This wall will have the added benefit of keeping 4m of ocean rise out,
I guess they have no idea how much energy a tsunami packs. No matter how deep the structure is anchored in the ground, no matter how strong the walls are... there is no way to break the momentum of a tsunami wave hitting the land hard.
It keeps the titans out.
12.5m is about twice as high as the dikes around here (southern Denmark). They were built to that height when I was a child, so around 30 years ago.
12.5m does not sound far out. Concrete wall may, though, our dikes are made of dirt with grass, with a long slope towards the ocean, so that the water doesn't hit head on, but tries to flow over, except it's too high, so it flows back before actually getting over. On the other hand, they are made to hold when the wind causes the water to hammer on them for a day at a time, I don't know how much energy a tsunami carries. The devastation was enormous last time, but most of the debris appeared to be wood, with most buildings still standing, so maybe a wall is not that bad an idea (and if it was, they'd likely have picked a different solution).
This is just a subsidy for the construction industry, like all the paving of hillsides and mountainsides in rural Japan. I would be surprised if there's any science supporting this wall as an effective tsunami countermeasure.
Not long ago I actually watched a multi-episode jdrama one of the main characters of which was a biologist researching the devastating effect a breakwall had had on marine life. A 250-mile long wall sounds absolutely disastrous from an ecological viewpoint.
The wall is actually to keep out the Diakiaju! Run Godzilla!
The wall will fail, their Gundam will fail as proven in Pacific Rim. Either they close the Rift or Gojira rescues us.
They should outsource the wall design and construction to the French. They have experience building walls/defense.
Then they outsource the testing for effectiveness to the Germans.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This plan won't work. In a typhoon you would get multiple waves that look like this.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/6569256/Storms-batter-Britain.html?image=5
Constructing a wall to withstand a tsunami at the very least will be challenging and may in fact be impossible. And a 40 ft. wall may be as useless as teats on a bull. What would a fifty foot wave do to a 40 ft. tall wall? It is difficult enough to build a dam that will hold calm water but the speed and weight of water in a Tsunami is a whole different kettle of fish. Maybe tsunamis could be called home delivery for sushi.
Americans could build Berlinesque walls on the norther border at that price/hour, in addition to another to the south and along the eastern seaboard and the Pacific coast.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
5 or so mile long wall to protect a city, OK. A 250 mile wall? Has anyone even considered the long-run negative consequences? How about the effect on winds and temperatures inland? How about all the extra CO2 dumped in the atmosphere to make the concrete? If something's needed to protect existing nuke power plants, go for it. But for buildings, just let 'em go and design the new ones to accomodate tsunamis.
tsunami or kaijus protection?
At that cost... It would take about $35 billion to completely surround Florida with a wall and protect it in the event that ALL ice melted on the planet. IMHO, Florida would have the worse problem with rising sea levels in the US.
From a purely economical standpoint it's really not that bad. The world would suddenly get the natural resources of Greenland and possible Antartica also...
If you can stop a jaeger, you can stop a tsunami.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Not only inelegant, but dangerous...to a non-Japanese country.
If the entirety of Japan can rebuff a giant wave, then that wave must slosh back in the other direction (instead of being dissipated by land).
So, who is responsible for such "bounce" waves?
I come here for the love
...but it's a start.
They're gonna build a Great Wall of Japan sooner or later, for some reason or another. Keep out The Fog or The Blight or whatever, the one that brings monsters or disease or it kidnaps people or something.
I feel like giant walls have been leaking into culture more. Pacific Rim, sure, but consider Shingeki no Kyojin or Darker than Black or Maze Runner, and those are just the recent ones. Giant walls are the new "human (female) locked away in a sealed box/chest, discovered later".
just sayin'
Build it so people can live in it. Have panels of high tensile glass so people can enjoy the view. Between the wall and the sea plant trees and make it into a garden. Allow access to the beach but the exit must be self sealing mechanically.
"4.4m households in Japan were left without electricity and three moderate nuclear meltdowns were triggered at the Fukushima nuclear powerplant." What would a major meltdown look like?
He's totally right that building a wall would be a garish ecological disaster. Sorry to see that your attention span was too tiny to get to that part.
kinda like any engineering project, I guess... pick the maximum incredible external threat, and design resistance to... uh, wait, the budget got cut HOW MUCH? OK, well, guys, let's pick the maximum credible external threat we can protect against 80% of the time for under $7 billion. make it modular so we can truck 'em in. seaming with tape is OK if we have to.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's well known that the New England windmills were prevented by rich people who complained that they'd be eyesores. Everyone says "ooh, it's Not In My Back Yard Syndrome" and forgets that those same rich people are incredibly heavily invested in existing energy suppliers .
In Delaware, the public and the more populist politicians were overwhelmingly in favor of putting windmills on our shores. Shitloads of them. Fucktons of them. Imperial arseloads of them!
But somehow, that didn't happen either. It seems that the windmills suppliers had inexplicable financial problems, as often happens when you run afoul of the super-rich.
I don't think the NIMBY or the financial problems were real. I say, follow the money. The .01% do not want coastal windmills, because the wind blows all the time in those locations... think about it. Most windmill installations are not a threat to existing powers. The ones in PA don't move about a third of the time. But whenever you try to put one in a place where the wind blows all the time, suddenly the migrating birds and appearance become very important!
First I think they need to work on having enough people in their country to make such a wall worth it... The way their population is declining, pretty soon even if a tsunami hits, no one will be left in the country to notice it.
Bring It On!
Water often looses. See the Netherlands. In fact: hire the Dutch to design your wall.
No, hire Vogons to read poetry to it.
This causes the Tsunami to turn immediately and hurl itself in the other direction.
They're meaning Godzilla.
Anyone else suspicious (or hopeful) that tsunami in this case is a codeword for Kaiju?
"the Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The article makes much more sense when you substitute Kaiju for Tsunami.
It should really be noted that's it not the height, it's the volume of water. Waves crest at about 100 feet apart during normal tides, but during a tsunami the wave crest distance stretches up to about a kilometer. The water will just stack higher and higher. How about not fucking build permanent structures in the land at historically dangerous tsunami sea levels. Like only above 200 feet above sea level or what ever jas historically always been a safe height.
Level.
Exactly who are these 'authorities'? Where are the 'plans'? Who approved the money for this project and why do the citizens have no say in it? Later the word 'proposals' is used; so is it a plan or a proposal?
This is very poor journalism. Not a single authority is identified. There are references to two critics of the project who have no authority and their opinion doesn't matter. There is no substance to this story at all, no citations, no evidence that it is not just in the reporter's imagination.
& cement is not the same as concrete.
...omphaloskepsis often...
First, you must eliminate the incentive for tsunamis to come ashore. Once that is done, they will have no reason to enter Japan. Isn't this obvious?
"A news report says Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant was so unprepared for the disaster that workers had to bring protective gear and instruction manuals from elsewhere and borrow equipment from a contractor. The report, released by operator Tokyo Electric Co, is based on interviews of workers and plant data. It portrays chaos in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful battle to protect the Fukushima plant from meltdown, and shows that workers struggled with unfamiliar equipment." ap.org/ - "Scientists have found traces of radioactivity in fish off the California coast that migrated from the waters off of Japan, site of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster of 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The researchers say the evidence is unequivocal. The young tuna were found to be contaminated with two radioactive forms of the element cesium from Fukushima." http://content.usatoday.com/co... - "Japanese whalers caught 2 animals along the northern coast that had traces of radiation from leaks at a damaged nuclear power plant, officials said. 2 of 17 minke whales caught off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive cesium, both about 1/20th of the legal limit, fisheries officials said. They are the first whales thought to have been affected by radiation leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant since it was hit by a 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami." nhjournal. com http://www.newser.com/story/14... http://www.newser.com/story/11... http://www.newser.com/story/17...
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