Hat Tip To Rolf.
At lunch I asked the question about how does a place like New York City start to deal with the water and mud that has plagued their streets and subways.
Then came the answer in an email from Rolf who read an interesting article, and knew we would like to see it. Little could he have known, it also answered a lunch time question.
National Unwatering SWAT teams.
The team of four expert engineers left for New York City this afternoon and are expected to arrive between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Delt said they are the finest unwatering experts in the country, given their experience in dewatering the inundated areas of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “They’re subject experts,” he said. “They can’t do all of the work themselves but they can advise the other people in New York.”
The team’s tools consist of trailer-mounted trash pumps with discharge pipes 8 to 16 inches in diameter. The engine-driven self-priming pumps can pass water and even golf ball-sized debris. And if the task is too big, they can resort to less mobile pumps with discharge pipes ranging from 16 to 40 inches. The size of the pump depends on the scale of the problem. Delt said a 30-foot hole filled with water is one thing, but if that 30 foot hole is filled with water and leads to a whole subway system that stretches for miles under ground, it’s a much bigger effort.
Then there’s the issue of what to do with the water once you’ve moved it out of that hole. “You don’t want to just dump it in the nearest gutter,” he said. “You have to find out how far horizontally you want to pump it,” in order for the water to wind up back in the ocean.
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 